


A Radioactive Picnic

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: After The World Ends [2]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Albert saves the day a lot, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic Cooper, Bisexual Male Character, Cuddling & Snuggling, Explicit Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post-Nuclear War, Radiation Sickness, Slow Burn, Unprotected Sex, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:27:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26472598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: Harry gets up and goes over to Dale, sandwiching a hand between both his palms. Dale’s fingers twitch slightly and his eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t look. A small noise comes out of his throat.“Hang in there, Coop. Albert’s gonna have you fixed up in a couple days.”“Hm.”“Dale, say something,” Harry half-begs in a whisper. His friend hasn’t said a word since they went to sleep last night.
Relationships: Albert Rosenfield & Harry Truman, Dale Cooper & Albert Rosenfield, Dale Cooper/Harry Truman
Series: After The World Ends [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1924501
Comments: 51
Kudos: 45





	1. Speaking

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a continuation of the premise from [Come Find Me At The End Of The World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26372953). You can understand this one without having read that one, but it's only 4300 words and I'm proud of it, so if you read that one too I won't be unhappy about it :)
> 
> It says angst in the tags, but this angst is mainly due to recurring whump-factors. Pretty much the best way to describe it is something I said to a writer friend: I kick Cooper a few times, but I go after Harry with a sledgehammer.
> 
> The title of this fic is a subtle nod to a Soviet sci-fi novella called _Roadside Picnic_ which you've probably never heard of. It inspired a Tarkovsky movie in 1979 as well as the Metro novel series, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro game series (the latter based on the novels of the same name).

“The tomato soup wasn’t necessarily a bad idea,” Albert comments, leaning heavily on the doorframe while Harry frantically struggles Dale into some warm clothes. “Potassium is important. And the applesauce was good too because it can be a source of magnesium. So my guess would be that he’s low on phosphorus. Do you have any soda?”

“No, why the hell would I have soda?” Harry snaps.

“Because the only other way to reliably get him to ingest it is to feed him red meat, which his stomach can’t handle right now,” Albert barks back.

“Great!” Harry yells, yanking Gore Tex shells onto his sick friend. “I’m taking him to Hawk, maybe he knows something that can help…”

“Where do you keep your medical stuff? Are there any IV supplies left?”

“I don’t know, everything we have is at the station. I have nothing to do with medical shit.”

“He has refeeding syndrome, if we can put him on an IV and intravenously introduce a phosphate solution he may recover.”

Dale, not fully cognizant at the moment, weakly grabs onto the sleeves of Harry’s flannel like he’s trying to protest what’s happening to him. Harry gently pries him loose again and then scoops him up off the bed - he weighs all of a hundred and thirty pounds right now, so it’s less difficult than it should be if he was healthy. Of course, if he was healthy, this wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

Albert staggers after Harry into the kitchen, still obviously weak himself.

“How come you’re not sick?” Harry demands.

“He was already underweight for his height when the nukes were launched,” Albert explains, pulling on his combat boots. “And he had a second bout of ARS after he drank some water that was loaded with cesium, which didn’t help anything.”

Harry sets down Dale long enough to hand over his backup set of rain gear to Albert, then puts on his winter coat because at this point that’s all he has left. Any other time and he would hate wasting resources by making a five minute drive in the diesel truck, but Albert sure as hell can’t walk all the way to the station and Dale can’t walk at all, so it’s necessary.

“Here, go to the storage room at the end of the hall on the right.” Harry hands his keys to Albert. “If there’s anything you can use, it’ll be in there. I’m gonna bring him to the second conference room, we use that one for sick people who don’t have radiation poisoning.”

They both head inside. Harry puts Dale onto one of the hospital gurneys and pulls over an IV pole that has a flashlight duct taped to it. The Gore Tex comes off and so does the flannel, and Harry rolls up one of Dale’s thermal sleeves before flicking on the light. Dale moves slightly and Harry grabs his hand to settle him.

It takes way too long for Albert to come into the room, but he’s carrying stuff and looks triumphant. An IV bag, plastic tubing to go with it, a pack of syringes, vials, tape, and then a half-full bottle of vodka.

“Presumably this is the only skin-safe antiseptic you still have.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

“It’ll do in a pinch.” Albert drops his pile in the space between Dale’s calves on the gurney. “Here, tie this around his upper arm and wipe the inside of his elbow for me.”

Harry does these two small steps while Albert fiddles with everything else, but he almost can’t watch the catheter go into the vein. The needle comes out and leaves behind just the plastic hookup, which the IV line is plugged into and then the whole assembly is taped to Dale’s arm so that it can’t get yanked out by accident. A syringe of something gets shot right into the fluid line and the bag gets hung on the pole beside the flashlight, which is now turned off to save the batteries.

“We’ll have to keep an eye on him,” Albert sighs as Harry drapes the flannel back over Dale’s chest in the absence of a blanket.

“Should I get anything for either of you to eat?”

“Tomato juice if you have any… I can take some more applesauce. Usually the first four days after starvation are the most important, after that you can start reintroducing solid food. Before this we were sucking on hard candies every so often and that might be the only reason we lasted as long as we did out there.”

“Will he be okay?”

“Maybe. If we can get him through the next couple days, he’ll probably pull through.”

“Right… I’ll see what I can dig up for you to eat and maybe send Donna over to help you, she’s been reading her dad’s medical textbooks.”

“How much does she know?”

“Four months worth of chapters,” Harry shrugs.

“Great,” Albert snorts, rolling his eyes.

“Y’know, instead of getting all cranky about this, maybe you should teach her,” he suggests in a tone that means he isn’t actually suggesting.

“How smart is she?”

“She’s not stupid and she has no sense of humor, you’ll love her,” Harry promises before leaving the room.

There isn’t really tomato juice… he does give Albert some applesauce, then soaks some dried tomato slices in water for awhile and squeezes the fluids out of those to get “juice,” which is apparently good enough. Albert drinks some and then they help Dale also take a few sips even though he’s delirious and not really talking or moving on his own. Harry’s breakfast is mashed potatoes and garlic, which he eats cold out of the jar because he has no way to make a fire here in the station to warm it up.

After that it’s a lot of sitting and watching. Hawk takes pity on him and agrees to split his chores with Andy today so that he can be where Dale is, and he stays out of the way in the corner while Albert grudgingly takes Donna under his wing. Using the almost-unconscious Dale for a practice dummy, he shows her how to do vitals and check reflexes, talks about what to look for with a patient’s skin, bulging veins, signs of infection, how to tell a radiation burn from a chemical burn. She writes down every word he says in a notebook while Harry forgets all of it five minutes later because he’s much more interested in whether Dale will ever get up off that gurney again.

“And finally,” Albert snarks, “we have what’s called ‘distressed loved ones.’” He points directly at where Harry’s sitting. “This one, thank god, is being quiet and not getting underfoot, but sometimes they’ll yell and be hysterical pains in your ass.”

Harry glowers at Albert but doesn’t reply. Donna looks like she doesn’t have a clue what to say to that, and even if she did Albert doesn’t give her the chance to anyway - he immediately demands to see all the radiation victims and both of them leave the room. Harry gets up and goes over to Dale, sandwiching a hand between both his palms. Dale’s fingers twitch slightly and his eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t look. A small noise comes out of his throat.

“Hang in there, Coop. Albert’s gonna have you fixed up in a couple days.”

“Hm.”

“Dale, say something,” Harry half-begs in a whisper. His friend hasn’t said a word since they went to sleep last night.

“’M thirsty…”

“Okay. Hang on.” Harry grabs the glass of “tomato juice” and lifts Dale’s head so he can take sips of it. “Take ’er easy, Coop, don’t choke…”

Dale actually manages to suck down the rest of what’s in the glass without any problems; Harry lays him back again before setting it aside on the windowsill. Dale’s eyes crack and find his face.

“Harry…”

“Yeah, Coop.”

“I have… headache…”

“Yeah, it’s okay, Albert put you on an IV and shot you up with something. You’ll start feeling better soon.”

“Okay…”

“You wanna go back to sleep? I’m staying right here to look after you.”

“Want you here, Harry…”

“I know, I’m right here.” Harry pats his forehead and holds his hand. “Y’know, Coop, going forward, there’s better ways to get my attention than getting hurt and sick…”

“Yes,” Dale agrees quietly. He’s probably about to pass out. “Still need to talk. Later.”

“Yeah? About what?”

And Dale falls asleep. Figures.

Harry sighs, gently setting Dale’s hand back down. The gray light coming through the rain-spattered window leaves patterns on his friend’s face, making everything in the room paler and harsher to look at. It hurts a little knowing the ordeal Dale went through while journeying here, only to come down sick again because Harry fed him too much by accident.

Hawk pops into the room. “Harry, Andy found some cough syrup this morning, you won’t have to keep looking tomorrow on your next run out.”

“Oh. Good, I’m glad.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Not great. I got him talking for a couple minutes, but he wasn’t all there. I almost couldn’t get him to wake up this morning.”

“Is Donna following Albert Rosenfield around on purpose?”

“Yeah, he’s teaching her some stuff… hey, he’s not doing all that well either, see if you can’t get him to sit down and have some soup or something in a few minutes. They were about one more day from just dropping dead when I found them yesterday afternoon.”

“Will do.”

“Thanks, Hawk.”

Albert comes back a few minutes later and drops way too heavily into the chair in the corner, accepting a small portion of tomato soup from Hawk, who follows him in. He’s pale and shaking and clearly shouldn’t have been running around seeing patients so soon.

“He spoke to me a little bit,” Harry reports.

Albert nods between careful bites. “Good. His neurological function will probably be impaired for some time, so don’t expect any long speeches out of him for at least a few weeks.”

“Hey, we won’t… we won’t have to leave him here overnight, will we?”

“It wouldn’t be a good idea, it’s too cold in here. Same for the victims in the next room over, they should go someplace warm to sleep and then come back for treatment during the day. I even told them all that, too.”

“It’s actually almost easier during winter than fall or spring, we can pile the snow up all around the buildings and they stay warmer that way,” Harry comments. “And we kinda try to pack into rooms together during the day, that helps a lot. There’s less elbow room to get work done, but it’s worth it.”

Albert nods. He looks like he could fall asleep right in that chair, but manages to finish his soup with painstaking slowness. “Is acute radiation syndrome endemic here or is this a rare spike in cases?”

“There was a tank of bad water. Our meter died a few weeks back, we had no way to test it… they’re the ones who drank it.”

“Do you still have the broken one? I might be able to fix it.”

“Yeah, it’s around here somewhere. You need to stop doing shit though, before you collapse. Albert, nobody wants you working yourself to death now that you’re here. Try to rest up, get better at least a little before you go running off your legs for sick people who aren’t actually dying.”

“It’s not an inaccurate assessment on your part,” Albert says, sounding surprised. “They’re mainly uncomfortable. Most of them will live without medical intervention if they’re put on light duty for two or three weeks and avoid further exposure, so eight of them can go home today and not come back. With the other four, three need to be checked on for signs of infection and one needs a blood transfusion or she might die. I don’t suppose you know anyone with type O.”

Harry groans and rubs his face. “Dammit, Albert, why do you always have to make my life hard?”

“Excuse me?”

“…I hate needles.”

“Thank you for volunteering.”

“You’re welcome, you bastard. Finish your damn soup.”

Albert stares pointedly at him while taking the last bite, then sets the bowl on the floor and slumps in the chair. “That can wait until I stop being dizzy.”

“You want some water?”

“No, I’m not dehydrated. Lightheadedness and even vertigo are common to malnutrition victims. Remember Coop falling all over himself yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s not going away anytime soon for either of us.”

“Great,” Harry grumps. “Albert, listen, I have to go out and do stuff tomorrow, it’s not fair for me to dump all my chores on other people. You’ll make sure he stays put, right?”

“He’ll probably be sleeping off and on anyway, it shouldn’t be hard to keep him penned in.”

“Okay. I’ll be gone at least most of the morning, but Hawk should be around if you need anything until I get back. And Albert… try to take care of yourself, too, like I was saying earlier.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Albert says in a tone that actually translates his words into _I’m making no promises._ He frowns. “Were you at any point exposed to chemical weapons besides blister agents?”

“What, like nerve gas?”

“There were reports of novichok and VX in some locations, yes.”

“No. I was lucky, if I got hit by nerve gas I wouldn’a made it back at all.”

“Probably not,” Albert agrees. “What about ARS?”

“I got sick about the same time everyone else did at the very beginning, but I guess we had it pretty mild.”

“Was a complete survey done of the town?”

“Not really, we were always using the Geiger counter for other stuff.”

Albert frowns. “You should really do that at some point, then. It’ll help keep your recurrences of ARS down.”

“Yeah.” Dale stirs a little on the gurney and Harry’s focus immediately redirects to his friend. “Coop?”

A sharp breath in. “Harry…? Are you alive?” His eyes aren’t open.

“Yeah, I’m right here. Hey, I told you I wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t I?”

“You did?”

“Were you having bad dreams or something, Coop?”

“I… yes, I think so…”

“Okay. Hang on.” Harry, with as much care and tenderness as possible, lifts him upright into a sitting position and then hugs him. He makes sure Dale’s ear is right on his breastbone. “Better?”

A limp nod, and there are no more words. Harry’s worried about that, Dale’s usually such a talker (or at least he was before the world ended and he would completely hijack any phone conversations they had). But it also leaves him wondering if there’s other stuff going on, too… because Albert also starved, but is talking just fine. Meanwhile Donna didn’t say a word to anyone for a week after Doc Hayward died.

Harry dreads the answer to this question, but he knows he’ll end up asking it eventually: what, exactly, happened with Dale out on that road?


	2. All Better Now

“Just a few spoonfuls,” Albert reminds Dale. “Fat is important, it’ll help stop your body from continuing to try and eat itself.”

Dale nods and scoops some venison gravy out of the jar. He swallows it without complaining (the apocalypse doesn’t favor picky eaters) but Harry can kinda tell that he doesn’t like how it tastes because it’s not warm. There are five slow bites and then the jar is handed to Albert, who also takes the same number of spoonfuls at the same speed. After that Harry gives them their tomato soup, also cold, and eats his own breakfast while they’re choking that down. Today for him is potato chunks with mushrooms, so he pours a bunch of the gravy into his jar and mixes it in because he’s cold and also needs some animal fat in his meal.

“Okay, fellas. I’m out scavenging today, it could take the morning or I could be out until dinner. Ask Hawk if you need anything, he’ll check on both of you periodically while I’m gone. Coop, you gotta just stay in bed and let Albert inject you with stuff… Albert, try not to work too hard. When I get back I need a haircut and I’ll grab some more soup for you two, and then after that I’m having a bath once we get home. Sound like a plan?”

“Harry, you should borrow my MOPP suit,” Dale says, very randomly.

“Okay, but why?”

“Because…” And he loses his train of thought. “I’m not sure.”

“Because his is better than you wearing a raincoat,” Albert supplies.

“Yes, that,” Dale agrees.

“Alright, I will. Albert, can I take your meter, too?”

“By all means. Anything reading higher than ten is dangerous and you should avoid it if you can.”

Even though Dale’s fully awake this morning, Harry still carries him out to the truck after breakfast. He drops the two of them off at the station first and also picks up Albert’s meter as well as a couple snacks for himself, then heads towards the highway and stops near the edge of town so he can get the rest of the stuff he needs.

Dale’s MOPP suit, a deer rifle with ammo to go with it, his own gas mask because he’s more familiar with it and it hasn’t been used as much. It’s a really weird feeling because the suit is a different rubber from rain gear, it’s heavier and closes up all on its own without needing tape. The overboots cover the shoes he’s already wearing and the gloves leave him no manual dexterity at all.

Harry’s not going anywhere near as far as he did a couple days ago, mostly because he doesn’t have the fuel for that in his truck. He has to wonder what they’re planning to do once they can’t find vegetable oil at all anymore…

It’s raining by the time he gets where he’s going, but for once he’s still perfectly warm and dry while climbing out of the truck because this MOPP suit doesn’t have tears he could put his fist through like that rubber rain gear did. He parks the truck in a pretty well-hidden spot and sticks the battery in his pack, then heads to the first stop - a national forest ranger cabin. After a few steps he remembers that he has a Geiger counter and turns it on. Once it’s warmed up, he flicks it to the smallest setting and it turns out the level is low enough here that it won’t even register. That doesn’t mean much, though, only that it’s less than a hundred milliroentgen. He has to wonder how many rem he’s taken cumulatively by now whether he got immediately sick or not.

The door is locked when he gets there. There’s tons of windows he could break, but that runs the risk of putting holes in his protective gear (something he learned the hard way early on). So instead, he takes off his pack and pulls out the crowbar he always brings for exactly this reason, and a couple tries later the door opens for him.

Inside the ranger cabin, not much has been disturbed in the last thirteen months. There’s a bunk bed, a small table beside a compact kitchen, some maps. Harry grins inside his mask and pulls open everything, coming up with a package of instant noodles, AA and AAA batteries, duct tape, a toolbox, three flashlights, a first aid kit, road flares, two coils of rope and some bear traps. Smashing the lock off a personal footlocker gives him a half-full bottle of aspirin and - interestingly - a tub of Vaseline. Both go into his pack.

This is already a great haul, so he heads back to his truck and stashes everything in the crate bolted to the underside of the bed. Maybe in a few days he can feed some of those noodles to Dale, get some concentrated carbs into his friend. He’ll check with Albert once he’s back if that’d be okay.

A quick check of the Geiger counter - still a level that doesn’t show on the dial. Harry pulls off his glove and reaches into his backpack, then takes a huge breath and holds it before lifting his mask long enough to pop some dried apple slices into his mouth. They pretty much dissolve on his tongue, so he swallows everything without chewing and then breathes out as hard as he can to get any possible dust particles out of his gas mask. The glove goes back on, his pack is closed up, and then he’s walking.

There’s one other cabin he knows of around here, but this one makes him carry his rifle in his arms instead of slung on his shoulder. One of those weird survivalist lunatics used to live out this way, but it’s been over a year and Harry has to wonder if that guy is still alive. Not that he ever actually wants people to die, but Harry hopes that’s the case this time. He has a hundred other people to look after right now, including four radiation injuries and two starvation victims - whatever supplies that nutcase might’ve hoarded would be better served getting carried away in the bed of the diesel truck than hanging out in some basement and going bad.

What he finds there, despite being gruesome, is admittedly good for him. Two bodies. One he’s pretty sure is the survivalist, owing to the beard - he remembers the guy having a beard. The other he has no idea. The corpses are mostly decayed, bones and rotten clothes and hair. As near as he can tell, the second person tried to steal from the survivalist and they both shot each other out here by the porch.

Harry sticks his head in through the door and immediately realizes he’ll have to just bring the truck here instead of running back and forth, because today really is just turning out this good for him. A twenty minute walk, hook up the battery, a five minute drive. And then Harry is piling things into the bed, heaps of supplies. Soap, army rations in their original packaging, several rifles which all have about four hundred rounds each, liquor, first aid supplies, batteries, road flares, duct tape, bad weather gear of all kinds, hazmat suits, gas masks, bulletproof vests, manual water filters, two Geiger counters, chemical decon kits, tools, dried and canned food, canned water, tarps, rope, chains, hiking and camping equipment, painkillers, combat and hunting knives, two buckets of salt, toilet paper.

It takes almost three and a half hours for Harry to load everything. He crams stuff into every crack and crevice of the truck, then takes one of those nice blue tarpaulins and ties it tightly over the mountain in the bed to keep it dry and in place. The only thing he didn’t get was vegetable oil to gas his truck with… he wishes he’d come here sooner, but he’d also figured it would be better to exhaust the easier and more well-known locations first before trying to attack a survivalist.

Harry barely waits to get wiped down before he’s ripping off his mask so he can talk. “Andy, go get Lucy and Hawk to help me with this, Christmas came early this year.”

Lucy is actually great for this job - she’s smart and better than almost anyone he knows at keeping track of a billion tiny things. Everything is organized in a specific way according to what she came up with at the beginning: weapons in evidence lockup, medical supplies in the storage room at the end of the hall, food in Harry’s former office, water drums in the bathrooms, and everything else down in the cells and interrogation room.

Harry is careful unpacking the truck. He hides a few things in the glove box after that’s already been emptied, stuff he wants to bring home and not share. Impulsively, one of those is the tub of Vaseline. He doesn’t even know what he wants it for, it just seems like a good idea.

“Pretty impressive haul, Harry,” Hawk comments as they drag boxes of cans into the station together.

“Yeah, I got lucky. We have a little bit of a safety cushion with the food, now… and the soap. Man oh man, it’s a good thing that wing-nut who lived out in the woods wasn’t around anymore, I got all this from him.” Harry finally sets down his box and wipes his forehead on his sleeve. “Anything happen while I was out?”

“Cooper asked where you were a couple times, I had to threaten to tie Albert to a chair to get him to stop overworking himself. Other than that, not much.”

Harry chuckles. “Hey, they’re both still alive, that’s the important thing. Once we’re done with all this shit I’ll go see Coop for a minute and then I’m gonna go get my damn hair cut finally.”

“Good thing, too, you look like a poodle that lost its owner.”

“Hey, I’m ruggedly handsome,” Harry insists.

“Maybe, but you probably wanna look your best for Cooper once he’s back on his feet, right?”

“Huh?” Where did that come from?

“Never mind.” Hawk shakes his head. “That soap’s the best thing I've seen all month, now we can keep the fat and eat it when it gets real cold out.”

It actually takes _longer_ to finish piling everything into the station than it did for Harry to cram it all into the truck in the first place, which means that about ten hours after he left town he can finally see Dale again. He comes into the room and Albert is giving Dale a last injection of something before removing the IV.

“How’s he doing?”

“I’m fine,” Dale says automatically.

“Ignore him,” Albert snorts. “Dizzy on sitting or standing, loss of coordination and balance, persistent muscular tremors, lingering minor neurological deficiencies.”

“But is he any better?”

“A little,” Albert cedes. “And in two or three days when he can have real food again, he’ll start to improve much more quickly. Speaking of which.”

“Yeah, I gotta go get my hair cut and snag some water so I can have a bath after, but once that’s all done we’ll go home and eat. In the meantime I can probably get you guys some more tomato juice.”

“No, Hawk’s given both of us plenty of that already.”

“Alright. I’ll be back over in about half an hour or so,” Harry promises.

If Dale or Albert notice that it’s actually closer to forty minutes before they’re coming into his house, neither of them says anything about it. Harry builds a fire and warms up soup for them, slightly more than before, and while they wait for that he gives them applesauce. They must be getting really sick of eating just those two things over and over, but they don’t complain. Harry eats duck with vegetables and every so often feeds Dale a bite of the gravy out of his bowl.

Finally, at last, he can have his bath. Harry takes a lantern into the bathroom and pours the hot and then the cold water into the tub for himself, then sits on the lid of the toilet and starts pulling off his boots. He’s surprised when the door opens and looks up to see, of course, Dale, who closes it again and parks right there on the floor.

“You need something, Coop?”

“Not at the moment. I thought it would only be fair.”

It takes Harry a second to figure that out, and when he does he can’t help a chuckle. “What, you feel weird about me taking care’a you, now? You didn’t have any complaints while I was actually doing it.”

“No, it isn’t weird.”

And Harry realizes Dale just really wants to be where he is. He can’t fault his friend for that at all… not after everything in the last thirteen months. It seems natural, even. They had no way to know if the other was still alive, but both hoped to meet up again. Now that they’re back together, why waste time being separated by walls if they don’t have to be?

“Okay, Coop. Hang out as long as you want.”

Harry feels those bright eyes on every single one of his movements as he sheds layers of grubby clothing, but this isn’t a gaze that’s judgmental or even curious. Dale is just observing him, taking him in. What _is_ a little bit of a strange realization is that Harry vaguely recalls people wearing the same expression when checking out art exhibits as his friend has now while watching him undress.

And that suddenly makes Harry feel ashamed.

He pauses before undoing his belt and looks down at his trunk, very self-consciously, and wishes that Dale wouldn’t see how he looks now. If Dale was going to see him naked, it should’ve been when they knew each other before the bombs fell. Before a rifle bullet punched a hole through his bicep. Before his chest and back were polka-dotted with chemical burns from a blister agent. Before that bear trap, which would’ve taken his leg off three inches up from his ankle if he hadn’t been wearing snowshoes. Before he lost fifteen pounds last winter because he gave up his food for the people in his care who couldn’t just go out and try to bag a deer like he can, being that they were too young or too weak or didn’t know how.

Before he got hardened and ugly.

Harry takes a breath and closes his eyes. He peels his socks from his feet, then takes off his pants, and the bottom half of his thermals go in the pile. Somehow, he can’t look at himself anymore, now that Dale can see him this way. So he fixes his eyes on the edge of the tub as he gets in and almost misses the bar of soap when he tries to grab it.

“Harry.”

Dale’s expression is sad now, resigned.

“Yeah?”

A head-shake. “You know I’m like that, too.”

He does. Dale is forever marked by permanent reminders of the burning touch of radioactive fallout, pink or bright white discolorations every so often on his flesh. Comparatively speaking, Harry’s scars aren’t as bad (or even as numerous). But it bothers him for some reason that he can’t figure out.

“Are you still feeling okay?” Harry asks, trying to distract them both from his ruined skin.

“Yes, I’m better than I was yesterday morning.”

“Good.” Harry dunks under the water for a second to get his head wet and begins scrubbing the bar of soap into his newly-shortened hair - he’s almost not curly at all right now after getting it cut, which is good because this is way easier to keep clean and stuff into the hood of a protective suit. “Hey, I don’t want you feeling like you owe me anything later on, okay? I’m just glad you’re here at all and I want you to get back to a hundred percent. The only thing I want back is for you to stay now that you’re here, and knowing you that was already your plan anyway.”

“You’re a good friend, Harry.”

He grins for a second before dunking again to rinse out his hair. From there he pretty much just goes top-down like usual, and he resists a sudden urge to scrub all his old wounds extra-hard because logically he knows it won’t actually make them go away. Dale’s eyes still follow everything he does, but it feels softer now in a way Harry can’t quite explain, like his friend is trying not to scare him or something.

“What is it, Coop?”

“Oh, nothing. I was going to say something but I’ve forgotten what it was.”

“Alright, well, if you remember later feel free to tell me,” Harry shrugs.

He unplugs the drain and gets out of the already-cooling water to dry himself off, then realizes he forgot to grab clothes to change into… great. Now he’ll have time to get cold before he’s dressed. Harry directs an exasperated sigh at himself while tying the towel around his waist, and then they go to his bedroom together. Harry wants to yank on all his clothes as fast as possible, but he only manages to get on the bottom half of a set of thermals when he’s stopped by Dale’s palms on his wrists.

“I remember what I was thinking from earlier,” he announces.

“Okay. Can I get dressed while you tell me?”

“No, this is important. Harry, when you were a small child, did your mother ever offer to kiss bruises in order to ‘make them better’?”

“Uh… yeah, she did. Doesn’t everyone’s mother do that?”

Dale nods slightly and doesn’t say anything else. Instead he grabs Harry’s shoulder with one hand for balance and leans down - first to his upper arm and then one of the burns on his chest, the biggest one which is right under his collarbone. Light, brief kisses are placed on these two spots. And then… then, a third one, on the scarred part of his face. He knew this was part of Dale already, but it was always buried under the weirdness and the hyperactivity and the monologues before now: deep down, Dale is a very sweet guy who probably cares too much. But even if it is too much, Harry’s not about to start complaining.

“Are you better now, Harry?” he whispers.

“Yes,” Harry says, because there’s no other answer he can possibly give.


	3. Physical Wellness

Dale groans again in the corner.

Harry glances over his shoulder: “Coop, if you’re gonna throw up, just go ahead and do it already.”

“I’m fine,” Dale lies for the four hundredth time this morning.

“You’re having gravy for lunch,” he decides. “At least that won’t make you sick.”

“I’m not ill, I’m having cramps…”

“I stand corrected,” Harry snorts, turning back to the mushrooms he’s slicing.

It’s the fifth day that Dale’s been back in Twin Peaks and Albert decided they should have a few bites of solid food with their breakfasts - granted, this “solid” food was Albert nibbling some dried berries and then some cooked tomato pieces from Harry’s breakfast for Dale, so it barely even counts. Albert, of course, seems fine, while Dale is lying down on the floor carrying on and clearly trying not to puke.

Actually Harry’s kinda worried about this. Dale is such a trooper, he kept working after getting shot in the liver and then when the world ended marched most of the way across the country to come back here. The fact that he’s being brought down by stomach cramps really says something about how bad his physical health actually is, and Harry would much rather bring Dale home and cuddle him than sit here chopping vegetables on the counter Lucy used to answer calls and greet visitors from.

Albert sticks his head into the room and gives them both a disapproving head-shake.

“Do you have meat broth?”

“I have no idea,” Harry says honestly. “It might’a all got turned into stew already, you’ll have to ask Lucy. Why?”

“Never mind. Get him some water and have him sip it every few minutes with a couple bites of applesauce.”

“I’ll contain nothing but applesauce by the end of the week…” Dale comments in a way that’s trying to be funny even though he’s miserable.

Albert rolls his eyes and leaves again; Harry doesn’t see the harm in actually following his advice and so gets up to find water and yet more applesauce for Dale. They go into the kitchenette for this, which is actually a really good idea because Dale takes one sip of water and immediately throws up all over Harry. Harry is going to kill Albert later.

“I’m sorry-”

“Hey, don’t. It’s fine,” Harry cuts him off. “Uh. Just-just go siddown, I’ll be over in a minute.” He picks his way out of his flannel and drops it on the linoleum because he has no idea what to do with it yet, and only now notices that it’s all over his pants, too - and his boots, and the floor. Harry looks up at the ceiling, then covers his face with his hands, and finally screams “FUCK!” as loud as he can into his palms.

He’s going to _kill_ Albert.

Harry finds a ratty dishtowel and cleans everything up as best as he can, then goes back to Dale in just his thermal undershirt while noticing that it’s not warm at all in this damn building right now. Albert, conveniently, is already there waiting to be killed.

“Albert, you made him puke on me!” Harry snaps as he comes in.

“I did no such thing. Try meat broth instead if you have it on hand, the protein might help.”

“I’ll be alright,” Dale tries from the floor where he’s lying on his side again.

Harry glowers at Albert with all his might. “Fine. But you get to clean it up if he gets sick again because of this.”

Since the two of them are apparently not allowed to have any privacy at all unless they’re sleeping, Albert also has Donna observe the “procedure” and explains to her why this-and-such symptoms are happening for Dale and also why the protein from the meat broth might fix it. That is one nice thing Harry can honestly say about Albert, though - apparently he’s a very good teacher. In five days he’s already whipped Donna into shape as a competent medic on the level of a basic EMT.

Harry sits on the floor with Dale leaning back into him so that he can help hold the jar of broth steady, although the actual reasons are because this way he can simultaneously comfort Dale while also being out of the potential blast radius. Small, cautious sips. Harry can tell he’s gagging on the cold, salty fluid, but he dutifully chokes down the amount that Albert insists on all the same.

After the last swallow Dale coughs roughly and Harry hurries to set the jar to the side while waiting for him to throw up again, but he doesn’t. Instead he settles against Harry like most people lean into the back of a chair with a noise that’s trying to be a sigh and a groan at the same time.

“Feeling any better?” Harry asks gently in his ear.

“Marginally… I’d like to lie down again.”

“Alright, let’s get this outta the way…” Harry reaches the jar of broth up to the counter and carefully shuffles Dale into the corner. “How’s that?”

“What would I ever do without you, Harry?” Dale asks, and even through the forced grin it’s obvious that he’s being sincere when he says it.

“I have a suggestion,” Albert interrupts.

“What?” Harry growls, because he’s the one who Albert’s staring at.

“Postpone any vigorous physical activities until he can walk in a line without wobbling and/or no longer feels dizzy on standing or sitting up,” he says with a snarky grin, and then disappears to probably go torture somebody else.

Harry rubs his forehead, then sits behind the counter again to finish cutting the pile of mushrooms. He doesn’t think those kinds of comments are warranted and it annoys him that first Hawk and now Albert have said them. Dale was friends with Harry long before any of this, the two of them had already been through several horrible experiences together. They bonded, they trust each other, and now have been drawn back together again despite the odds. Of course they’re going to be glued to each other’s sides, especially while Dale’s still weak. Harry doesn’t mind looking after him at all, it’s the least he can do.

There’s nothing weird about their friendship that he can see given the circumstances… maybe Albert’s just jealous that Dale gets cuddled off to sleep every night now.

Harry transfers the sliced mushrooms into the plastic bucket and takes it to Lucy so she can distribute however much of them to be dried, to be added to stew, etc. The rest of his job for this morning is to peel and dice the last couple pounds of potatoes; they’ve all been dug up for sure, now, and some have been hung onto for replanting in April but the rest will be or have already been turned into food. He notices a tiny slice of mushroom that he missed on the cutting board… oops. He doesn’t get up again, though, and just pops it in his mouth.

It’s something that movies always got wrong about the end of the world. It’s not a constant running-around-fighting-for-your-life-against-the-odds. After about the first month, the past year has mostly been a whole lot of boring. It’s looking after people, it’s learning to farm potatoes, it’s digging around abandoned houses for duct tape and table salt.

“Hey, Coop.”

“Yes, Harry.”

“Now that you’re here and you’re more or less safe from the world, once you’ve got meat on your bones again what’s the first thing you wanna do?”

“Have sex,” Dale answers matter-of-factly. “It’s been entirely too long.”

Harry chuckles. “Yeah, good luck with that.”

“Why?”

“Almost everyone’s already got someone.”

“Yes, but not everybody does,” Dale points out.

“Alright, well… next time I’m out, I’ll try to find some condoms for you that haven’t gone bad,” Harry decides.

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

“Why not? The radiation make you sterile or something?”

“At no point did I say I would be having sex with women, Harry.”

Harry narrowly avoids skinning his other hand with the knife when his friend says that. He struggles to keep himself together.

“Uh. Well… uh, that’s your prerogative, I guess.” Harry swallows. “Are you really that desperate?”

“No. I’ve had sex with men before, it’s not a new behavior for me.”

“Okay.” Harry couldn’t be more shocked if he tried. “So… what’s it like? I mean, how different is it?”

“Oh, it’s…” He glances over and sees that Dale’s tired and struggling to hang onto this train of thought. “It’s… different. I enjoy it.”

“You don’t have to explain if you don’t want, I was just curious.”

Another glance shows his friend grinning up at him in a weird, mischievous way. “Curious enough to try for yourself?”

Harry snorts. “Well, I don’t know about _that._ Maybe if I met the right guy,” he jokes.

“Are you very picky about the men in your life, Harry?”

It’s asked completely seriously, too, which has him struggling not to laugh. “Coop, I’m not attracted to men in the first place.”

“Not at all?”

Why does it feel like Dale is fishing for a specific answer, here?

“No, I don’t think so… I never really thought about it that much,” is what he settles on.

“I suppose that’s understandable in a heteronormative society.”

Harry sets the now-fully peeled potato in the pile and pauses to look at Dale.

“So do you… have somebody in mind?”

“What? Oh.” Dale shakes his head. “It’s not important, Harry. As you can see, I’m not in any state to be pursuing a mate at the moment.”

“You’ll be well again in a few weeks,” Harry insists, finding a smile. “And guys’ll be falling over themselves to get you. Here, maybe you should have a couple more sips of that broth, it’ll get some nutrients in you.”

“Yes, alright.”

Dale’s pretty quiet the rest of the time that Harry spends with the potatoes, napping off and on in his spot on the floor. Once the damn potatoes are finally finished, Harry runs home for a few minutes to change his clothes and then comes back for lunch, which sees them sitting side-by-side while Dale eats a jar of gravy with tiny pieces of potato and mushrooms in it and Harry has venison stew. Dale stays pressed right up against him the whole time, and Harry figures out that he’s cold and so puts an arm around his shoulders to hug him closer and share some warmth.

His afternoon chores for today are as follows: measure the drums collecting water from rainfall for radioactivity and mark any that are unsafe, and then help wash the canning jars so that more food can be made in them. There are always, _always_ canning jars to get washed, an unending mountain of them. It’s why people only get to be clean once per week, because they need the water and the soap for washing all these damn jars.

There is one upside: this tedious job is so low-energy that Dale can come with him and participate.

They don’t really talk while they do this, but it’s a companionable silence, not uncomfortable at all. Actually Harry really likes it, they’re sitting together doing something mindless and enjoying each other’s company without the need for words. Harry does the actual scrubbing, Dale rinses the soap out after and sets them on the rack to dry, sometimes their hands and fingers bump passing the jars along. And Harry gets some thinking done during this repetitive task - how maybe in a few weeks Dale can come with him when he goes out scavenging, because the two of them together can carry more and keep each other safe, but also that he hopes Dale will just stay with him at his house because it’s nice getting to snuggle up to somebody before falling asleep.

At 6 pm, they can finally stop and go home. Dale follows him into the office to look at the food.

“Oh, there’s vegetable soup.”

“Too chunky for you,” Harry argues, shaking his head.

“No, I thought Albert might like it. I’m fine with gravy if that’s what you have for me.”

“Well…” Harry digs through a box. “…how about mashed potatoes? You can have gravy with it, if you want.”

“Perfect.”

A light turns on in Harry’s brain and he gives Dale a thumbs-up, which earns him a huge smile and a return gesture. They kinda giggle at each other like idiots for a second and then go find Albert, meals in tow. It’s about a twenty minute walk from the station back to Harry’s house, which isn’t great for two guys who almost died from walking too far without food, but wasting fuel to drive for five minutes in a truck that gets about ten miles to the gallon is unacceptable unless it’s an emergency.

“Hey, Coop?”

“Yes, Harry.”

He glances over from where he’s sticking food into the fire. “I was kinda thinking about this this morning before you got sick, you want me to cut your hair for you?”

“Yes, please. I kept it manageable with very little care or thought put into how it looks while we were on the road. But I thought you had someone cut yours for you.”

“Yeah, I did, because I can’t see the back’a my own head,” Harry chuckles. “I can cut hair, it’s not that hard. I just can’t cut my _own_ hair.”

“That stands to reason, yes. Thank you, Harry, I’ll be sure to take you up on that.”

Soup for Albert, then mashed potatoes for Dale. They split a jar of meat gravy because Harry’s meal is potatoes with carrots and peas and mushrooms, not really any protein. Bowls and spoons in hand, they squish right up against each other on the couch like they did during lunch. It happens so naturally, neither of them has to ask the other one for this, they just fit perfectly together and it doesn’t even have to be thought about.

“How’s your stomach, Coop?”

“I’m fine, don’t worry.”

“You say that like I have a choice,” he jokes.

“I’ll be alright, Harry,” Dale promises in a very serious tone, leaning more heavily into his side.

Harry can’t help a smile at that.

“Cooper, I feel it’s my duty to remind you that you could do better,” Albert butts in from the chair.

“Albert, when I want your opinion on the company I keep, I’ll be sure to ask for it,” Dale says flatly.

Once they’re done eating, Harry brings one of the chairs out of the kitchen and puts it in the warmer area next to the fire, then sets a lantern on the mantle so that he can see what he’s doing and sits Dale down with a bath towel around his shoulders. Scissors, a comb, turn the lantern up a little. Then Harry gets to work.

Dale’s hair is in pretty bad shape; from the look of it, he must’ve just been chopping it up every so often with a pair of kitchen scissors. Harry has to take handfuls off at first just to get it to about the same length all around, and after that the fine work can start - trimming it up away from his ears, evening out the edge where his head meets his neck. Dale’s very patient and holds still for Harry the whole time, allowing his head to be moved in whichever direction so that Harry can see better.

It’s during this process that Harry notices a scar on Dale’s left ear.

The tiniest V-shaped nick in the cartilage at the very top, with a thin white line following down almost to the bottom. This is a hell of an injury, subtle but very jarring now that Harry’s noticed it, and it’s impossible for him not to ask.

“Hey, what happened to your ear?”

“An attacker with a knife.”

“Damn.”

“I’m sure you’re hoping for me to expound on it, but it’s not a story I’d like to share at the moment.”

“Okay, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.” Harry snips a few last loose hairs. “Alright, you’re all set.”

The towel comes off and the chair is put back. It’s not anything close to how it looked before the world ended, but then again Harry’s doesn’t either, and in any case it’s a hell of a lot nicer than how it was before. Harry puts some more wood on the fire and they go back to snuggling in the corner of the couch, soaking in the warmth together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cooper's unusually careless attitude about safe sex is for two reasons: a) obviously he's banking on being able to sleep with Harry, who he trusts, and b) both of them have had radiation poisoning and were immune-compromised, so if they did have any STIs, they would know by now.


	4. The Words Aren't There

“It’s doable if we’re very particular about it,” Albert finishes. “But it definitely needs to be done, and before winter starts.”

Harry and Hawk share a look and then nod at the same time.

“We’ll need to come up with a materials list, this’ll be a big project,” Hawk says, “and we’ll also have to make a guess how long it’ll actually take so that everyone can know if you’re overdue and possibly in trouble.”

“I have to worry about what condition the engine of that truck’s gonna be in,” Harry adds. “It’s the only one we got and if it dies we’re shit outta luck.”

“Sealed containers,” Albert points out. “Any that got used for frying is all evaporated and dried up by now as it is. But there’ll be jugs of it stockpiled there, no looter would think of taking it. We’ll have to commandeer a couple of those 55-gallon drums to hold it, though, and maybe a ratchet-strap to keep the drums in place in the bed. Now, it’ll also be a good idea to hitch up a closed trailer, we won’t have room for all the salvage otherwise and it’d be best to get this done in one trip. The vegetable oil can be done by two people, but the hospital will require a five-man team.”

“Why?”

“Alright, it’ll be me and presumably you actually going inside to grab shit,” he lists, counting on his fingers. “Then one to guard outside the building, one to stay with the truck and guard that, and one to run back and forth delivering the stuff we pick up. Think about it: we won’t be able to get the truck anywhere near the hospital, it’ll be log-jammed with dead cars and ambulances.”

“Makes sense,” Hawk agrees. “Harry, who do you want for your three wing-men?”

“Ed can guard the truck to start with,” he decides, thinking. “And then… Andy can cover us while we’re inside the building, we’ll have James carting all the loot. You should stay here in case anything happens to me out there. Now… we’ve got a bunch of extra hazmat suits and gas masks, so we don’t have to do it in rain gear anymore. Ed and Andy can have deer rifles and we’ll give James a shotgun, I’ll take that M-16 Coop brought in with him. Albert, you’ll have the meter.”

“The hospital in all likelihood will be heavily contaminated,” Albert warns. “Especially in the emergency department and around the ambulance bays. There’s also going to be a massive amount of human remains. Can you handle that?”

For once, he seems like he’s genuinely asking and not trying to be a prick. Harry nods after a second.

“I’ve seen worse, I was in Seattle when the chemical weapons got deployed.”

“Okay then, that definitely qualifies. In any case, where I was going with that is this will be a long job and we won’t be able to stop and eat or drink inside the building. At the very least we’d have to go outside, possibly several hundred feet away. And just the two of us to loot a city hospital… this could be up to three days, not including travel and loading time. My guess is closer to four, round trip.”

“Albert, are you sure you’re up for this? You were about to starve to death a week ago,” Harry says, concerned.

“Six days, but who’s counting?” Albert corrects him dryly. “How else will you know what to grab? Or even what to look for in the first place?”

He nods. “Right… okay, next question. Will Coop be okay here by himself? He’s still not in great shape and I’m kinda worried about his mental state, I know the trip up wasn’t pretty for him.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him for you,” Hawk offers.

“That’ll be fine, have Donna help you do that, I want her to write down any changes in his condition so I can look when I get back,” Albert agrees.

Harry sighs after a second. “Alright, well, not a lotta sense in waiting around to get started on this, is there?”

And a few minutes later it’s him and Hawk piling empty drums into the bed of the truck. They get dressed in the two MOPP suits and toss deer rifles and packs into the back seats of the truck, and off they go to find the nearest fast food place.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Hawk says from the passenger seat.

“But you don’t like it?” Harry guesses.

“It just makes me kinda nervous, Har. What if something _does_ happen while you’re out rummaging around? I know you still don’t like it, but you’re in charge and if something happens to you out there, it’s not gonna go over well with anyone.”

“I’ll be careful,” he promises. “Make sure you’ve got a nice venison steak waiting for me when I come back.”

“You want a beer to go with that?” Hawk jokes.

Harry barks a quick laugh. “Yeah, if you can find one, that’d be great too!”

McDonald’s - not a place Harry ever ate at all that often, and not just because he rarely ever left the county long enough to be near one. Their burgers were crap and their fries were overly-salty, so he’d always pick someplace else to eat unless he was with someone who insisted on going there. But right now, this remnant of an awful fast food chain is one of his favorite places on earth, because true to Albert’s word there are still jugs and jugs of vegetable oil piled up in the back. Everything else has been stolen, the whole building completely stripped, but these are here for the taking.

They’re able to fill a drum about three-fifths of the way, which makes getting it back into the truck kind of a hassle. One jug isn’t poured in, but only because they empty it directly into the gas tank instead. After that it’s on to the next place.

This makes for a long day, but coming back to Twin Peaks after with a hundred and thirty seven gallons of fuel for the truck feels like a huge triumph to Harry. He spends the next couple of hours hashing everything out with Albert and the other three, and even when he goes home the work still isn’t done. He feeds Dale and Albert first, and while his own food is warming in the fire he strips and starts to clean the M-16 he’ll be borrowing tomorrow. This ends up with him taking a bite of food every so often while working with the needlessly-difficult assault rifle, scraping all the crud out of it and then oiling it all before piecing the five hundred thousand parts back together. Dale watches him the whole time, saying nothing and radiating apprehension.

Going to sleep later, they’re not spooned like they always have been before now - instead Dale faces Harry, head under his chin and folding into his chest. He wonders why Dale doesn’t just say “Harry I’m anxious” or something, he used to be better about that. Maybe the words aren’t there for Dale at all anymore, starving has clearly turned off parts of his brain and who knows if they’ll all come back on again in the long run.

Harry tries not to mind. He still cuddles Dale anyway and they both fall asleep.

The next morning is the busiest one Harry’s had in awhile. He gets dressed and then drives the three of them to the station, which means they don’t have breakfast until they’re already there. The last few things are put into place - one of the full fuel drums is secured in the bed with the ratchet-strap, each of them loads their backpacks: fish or meat jerky, dried fruit, four cans of water, a flashlight, spare batteries, ammo. Individually there are differences: Albert has a Geiger counter and its own set of spare batteries, Ed’s taking a few tools, Andy has a first aid kit, Harry’s got a crowbar. James brings nothing extra at all, because he’ll need as much free space as possible to run supplies from the hospital to the truck.

There won’t be enough room in the cab of the truck if everyone’s packs and guns ride with them, so those are piled into the bed with the drum while Ed hitches the trailer to the back. Ed also has to teach Andy and James how to put their hazmat suits and gas masks on correctly because Albert doesn’t have the patience for that this early in the morning and Harry is half-dressed in his being pulled aside by Dale.

“What’s up, Coop?”

And here it is again, Dale seems like he’s lost all his words, so Harry just pulls him in and hugs him. Dale is still fragile and skinny and the return hug is the strongest Harry’s felt him be since they found each other a week ago. Harry rubs Dale’s back and pats down his hair, trying to make him less anxious but not knowing what to say. And Dale turns just slightly, enough to kiss the side of his face. So Harry does it in return, because that seems like it’s the right response.

They pull back from each other and let their foreheads rest together for a couple seconds, then step away completely. Harry really wishes he could just bring Dale along, but the truck cab is already going to be full and more importantly Dale’s still way too weak to go out on even a normal scavenging trip, forget about a four-day slog through a decrepit and radioactive hospital in Spokane.

Hawk will have to look after Dale for now. Harry pulls on his gas mask and finishes doing up his suit, then climbs into the driver’s seat and tries to forget the misgivings he has about even taking Albert along for this, who’s barely back to eating regular food and could snap in half under the weight of an empty backpack.

Two hours and eleven minutes is a really long drive these days, especially with no radio, three guys somehow sleeping even though they’re wearing gas masks and sardined in the back seat of the cab, and the one other awake person isn’t anyone Harry can easily hold a conversation with and not have it devolve into bickering.

Harry really wishes Dale was here.


	5. Contaminated

“Eighteen,” Albert mutters, holding the Geiger counter out in front of them. “Let’s make it a point not to hang around this doorway too long.”

“Where do we start?” Harry asks.

“The top floor. We’ll work our way down, that way as we get more tired the trips to the exit will be getting shorter and shorter. Grab a gurney when you see one, we can carry more things with it.”

“What about the stairs?”

“The gurney can still transport the items _to_ the stairs,” Albert answers in a cranky tone. “Do me a favor and try to use all three of your brain cells, please.”

They aren’t actually going to go through the entire hospital - the campus is huge, there’s tons of medical office buildings, so Harry and Albert are only in the main building, which has the emergency department and the surgery center and all that good stuff. But this damn place is still huge and has five entire floors which will have to be searched by just the two of them.

Entering the building, the Geiger counter is rattling but Harry stops paying so much attention to it because he’s looking around to see what he’s dealing with in here. Gurneys abandoned in the hallways, the occasional skeleton in disintegrating scrubs, dark sticky spots on the floor that he doesn’t really want to know what they are. Gray light filters in through the windows, leaving deep shadows in the corners and around the edges of rooms. It’s hard to believe this used to be a place where people came to heal and he shivers a little bit under his MOPP suit as they look for the stairs.

Their first and probably easiest stop is the psychiatric unit, which has a few medications that Albert wants to grab. A locked door in the staff area gives up the precious vials of whatever the hell these drugs are, along with a stock of different-sized syringes and some boxes of unopened alcohol prep pads. Drawers in the nurses’ station have a small bottle of aspirin and for some reason an old mercury thermometer.

“So what’s your main goal here?” Harry asks while they head for respiratory therapy.

“Surgical supplies and medications. Most other things can be improvised with only a small loss of quality of care for the patient.”

They find a half-empty box of IV bags hiding under a desk and Harry immediately thinks of Dale having to be put on a fluid line a few days ago. Albert drags him back to the present by having him collect up a heap of saline bullets from a supply closet. They pry open a drug cart and rummage it carefully - there are only certain things that’ll be helpful, apparently, due to other limited resources and also the fact that Albert isn’t actually a doctor. And even if he was, he’d be a surgeon, not an intensivist.

“I’m kinda surprised this place didn’t get ransacked,” Harry admits as they unload the gurney onto the floor beside the stairs.

“It did, wait until we get to the ED. I guarantee you it’ll be absolutely trashed.”

Case in point: intensive care. This unit is nothing less than a disaster area. Even ignoring the mostly-decayed corpses still lying on the beds, there’s broken glass and empty containers and uncapped needles blanketing the floor. Harry picks his way to a nearby corner and grabs a push broom so he can clear a path for the gurney. It doesn’t seem all that likely that they’ll find anything in here, but they’re apparently going to look anyway, because Albert’s already poking around.

Turns out he was wrong. All the drug carts have been busted open and emptied, but there’s still various kinds of plastic tubing that Albert wants for some damn reason, as well as IV supplies, catheters, and two more bags of saline. All the wound care stuff is missing just like the medications. A supply closet has an unopened cardboard carton that has boxes of latex gloves inside it. There are three disposable needles in the nurses’ station that are still in their packaging.

“A hospital this size definitely would’ve had its own hazmat team,” Albert comments as they come back to the stairs. “There’s two possible locations those supplies would be at, which are near the emergency department or somewhere in the basement. The pharmacy will also probably be in the basement to help prevent stick-ups for narcotics.”

“How do we know it’s not already empty?”

“We don’t, but hospitals are easy to get lost in and it won’t be very well-marked. Besides, it’ll be hard to break into.”

“Great.”

Harry grabs an armload of stuff and starts lugging it down the stairs. Albert goes ahead of him to tell James that the first part of their haul needs to be carted away, and the whole process of getting even this not-that-big of an amount of supplies to the exit takes over an hour owing to the fucking stairs and the fact that Albert can only carry a few small lightweight items at a time. Harry, apparently, has been demoted to pack mule for this mission.

Before going back in to start the next floor, they walk far enough away from the hospital to get the Geiger counter to calm down and then sit. Harry yanks his hood back so that his mask can come off, and immediately his sweaty scalp and face are cold in the misty air of November 1st. Amazingly, it’s not raining, but that doesn’t make too much of a difference aside from not ruining cardboard boxes while James carries them to the trailer about a mile and a half away.

“So it’ll take four days for this whole thing?” Harry asks while pulling a can of water out of his pack.

“We’re going to get exhausted in a hurry,” Albert warns, “and that place is big. There _will_ be areas where we get a lot of supplies, and those will have to be moved.” They take turns sipping from the can before he goes on. “I’m already starting to run out of steam.”

“Well you could ride on the gurney while I’m dragging it around,” Harry offers.

“I might have to take you up on that.”

Harry unwraps the paper around his jerky and takes a few bites of it. There’s no point in both of them half-eating or drinking from their own packs, so they just pass Harry’s water and venison back and forth. It makes sense for Harry’s pack to be the one getting lightened, too, since he’s the one who has to lug shit around.

Before they head back, Harry undoes his suit and several layers of clothes so that he can relieve himself, which just makes him even more cold. And closing everything up again doesn’t really fix the problem, because he’s still aware that he’s been sweating and is damp under his thermals. Before he puts the gas mask back on he pours out all the condensation from his breathing, then it’s strapped to his face and the hood goes up and they head back to the building.

Harry starts to feel the lag as soon as they’re climbing the stairs. It’s only four flights instead of five this time, but even so. The fourth floor has pediatrics, the maternity unit, cardiology. And of course interspersed are some doctors’ offices and waiting areas. They do pediatrics first because it’ll be quick and easy; almost everyone with small children evacuated back when everything happened, so they don’t really need most of this stuff. All they’re after are IV bags, drugs, gloves, those kinds of things.

Pediatrics turns out not to be so quick and easy after all. Nobody has been on this unit, apparently, because there are still supplies all over the place, including those long skinny oxygen tanks. It takes five trips with the gurney to get everything Albert wants over to the stairs. The maternity unit is pretty similar, and Harry can see what Albert meant earlier - this floor’s catch is going to take forever to load into the trailer, and even just to get down to the exit. Albert’s definitely wearing down, too, which doesn’t help.

By the time they’ve finished that floor, the sun has been down for almost three hours. Everything gets left piled up inside the exit so that James can rest at the truck. And now for a real challenge: he gets to take turns sleeping with Andy so that someone’s still awake and guarding all night. Two hours on, two hours off. Albert parks in the same area they had dinner at, along with whoever’s turn it is to also sleep and the backpacks. So Harry’s periodically sitting next to the door in the dark, flashlight off, holding an M-16 that doesn’t belong to him. The fear keeps him awake through these moments… not so much of other looters, but of rabid animals, of the radiation that he knows he’s catching by being here.

Needless to say, Albert is a lot more rested than he is by the time morning rolls around. They eat jerky for breakfast, and his legs are about the same weight as iron bars walking back into the hospital. The third floor has mostly the regular patient units, plus the day hospital section. The entire area is ransacked. Plastic tubes and burst IV bags are all over the floor, used medication vials and needles. All the cabinets are opened and emptied, the drug carts have been pried apart with probably a crowbar or a claw hammer.

This really kinda makes it easier, though, because they’re just picking for scraps, not dragging heaps of stuff around. And each small prize feels like a victory: a chemical cold-pack here, a 3000 mL IV bag there. Packets of aspirin or Tylenol occasionally. A rare unopened syringe or strip of alcohol prep pads. Albert actually finds a vial of morphine that somehow got missed, along with four unused procedure masks.

All told, about a gurney and a half’s worth of materials come out of the third floor, which is a nice easy start to the morning. And they’re all small, lightweight items, so Albert can even help him carry them to the exit this time.

The second floor is kind of a mixed bag. There’s med-surge, recovery, and the OR. Those first two units have been more or less plundered the way the third floor and the ICU were, which means poking through piles of trash and hoping they won’t get stabbed with anything sharp as they’re looking for a rare success. In all, one gurney’s worth of items. But the surgical hall is curiously untouched.

There are no windows, so Harry and Albert are forced to turn on their flashlights and use up precious battery life. And this giant hospital of course has ten operating rooms which will all have to be looked through.

“Why the hell aren’t there any windows in here?” Harry complains as they grab boxes of trash bags and containers of liquid soap out of the soiled utility room.

“Because having holes in the wall isn’t conducive to maintaining sterile environments,” Albert grunts.

In any case, the surgical hall is pretty much a gold mine. The first OR alone needs two trips to get everything to the stairs, and Harry can already tell they won’t be able to get this whole area done by the end of the day. Albert, in his own way, seems really happy for once: sterile instruments, sterile gloves, medications galore, boxes and boxes and _boxes_ of syringes. This to say nothing of the insane number of IV bags.

They get two ORs emptied out before it’s time to call it quits for the day. Harry’s starting to feel stiff and sore, not just from working but also the lack of sleep and the cold. He wants to go home, where there’s stew and a fire and warm blankets and Dale.

God, he misses Dale.

The thought hits him like a truck and for a moment he stops chewing his jerky. Logically, he knows his friend is alright - Hawk’s keeping an eye on him, making sure he eats the right things in the right amounts to help him keep recovering. And of course there’s other people around. But all the same Harry has this feeling, that Dale’s maybe not quite alright without him, maybe his friend is lonely and not warm enough… and he _hates_ that. Harry hates that idea so much. It makes the ache to go home even stronger, so that he can snuggle Dale and make them both warm again…

After the guarding in shifts routine, getting to work on the third morning Harry’s starting to wish he’d never agreed to this. His knees are stiff, his back is sore, his fingers don’t want to move. Albert, despite actually getting full nights of sleep, also looks like he’s kinda the worse for wear. James seems to be doing alright, but he’s a lot younger than either of them.

Instead of going right for the ORs again, they start digging through the supply room of the surgical hall. This one section is going to take them all morning, with Albert piling on suture kits and packs of tools and sterile coverings. Harry already feels like a car running on fumes. And what the hell does Albert even want all this shit for anyway? It’s not like they’re constantly doing surgeries on people.

“Is this really necessary?” Harry asks after his third trip already to dump stuff by the stairs.

“Yes. These supplies could last for about a decade before we finally use them all, and it also gives me teaching materials.”

And so they keep going. Harry is beyond exhausted by the time lunch rolls around, and they still have the last two rooms to do before they hit the first floor. Supposedly, that one should be easier because it’s mostly the emergency department, which got torn apart and gutted by other looters long before now, and a neurology practice, which doesn’t have anything they want and so is going to get skipped.

The ninth operating room is kinda weird to be rooting around in, mostly because there’s human remains still on the table covered by a rotten sheet. Because of this, what Albert calls “a certain undoubtable level of biological contamination”, they take some things out of a closed cabinet in the wall and then crack open the drug cart. Everything else gets left right where it is. On to number ten. Harry’s so sick of this, working in the dark in these big rooms. At least they’re finally on the last one.

The pile of stuff to be carried now is absurd. Harry loads up his backpack and struggles to actually get it onto his shoulders, slings his rifle beside it. He grabs a box of something heavy and begins walking down. What’s really stupid, being that this section of the staircase connects the first and second floors, is that it doesn’t have a landing for some reason like the rest of the sections do. There’s no “turn around”, the whole thing just plunges straight down in one long line. Which means there’s no place for Harry to stop and rest for a couple seconds halfway. Who designed this damn building?

It goes like this for awhile. There’s no way they’ll actually be able to start the first floor today, it’ll have to wait until morning, and that’s gonna waste time they’ll probably need for breaking into the pharmacy and drug storage in the basement. He wants to be back before dinner tomorrow night, but that’s looking more and more unlikely.

There’s about two more armloads to go after his current haul. Harry adjusts and readjusts how he’s gripping the cardboard box of IV bags before taking the first step down the stairs. His legs are tired, he has no lower peripheral vision thanks to not only the box but also his gas mask. It’s a wonder it took until now for him to miss the next step and go careening downwards.

It’s like something out of Tom & Jerry. His foot overshoots the stair, it’s way too late to lean back again and he’s so overburdened that he can’t catch his balance anyway no matter how hard he tries. He pitches face-first to land on the box, loses his grip on it, and keeps thudding all the way down. It feels like he hits every single step, he flails but can’t stop what’s happening now that gravity’s really gotten ahold of him. When he reaches the bottom the full weight of the load in his backpack hammers down against him.

Harry just lies there, not trying to move. It feels like he’s still vibrating from the final impact and it’s too hard to breathe through his gas mask, especially because of the stabbing agony in his ribs. He couldn’t hear it, but he knows for sure that he felt something in his chest go _crunch._


	6. Help Out

“Try to stop shivering,” Albert demands.

“AAAGH!” Harry yelps when the bandage is pulled way too tight.

“That hurt?”

“What do you think!”

“Hm.”

Harry grinds his teeth and grabs really hard onto the edge of the truck bed - Albert made him stand against this derelict vehicle outside the radiation hot-spot to try and keep himself steady. Apparently there were popping noises coming from the ribs in his back when Albert listened to him breathing a couple minutes ago, so that means they’re almost definitely broken and need to get bound up with an ace bandage.

Albert finally finishes wrapping him and the only reason he doesn’t hurry to put his shirts back on is because it hurts to move too fast. He’s cold for one thing, but also being anywhere outside Twin Peaks and having to take his protective suit off makes him feel exposed and naked.

Thermal undershirt, flannel, pull the suit back on, gas mask, hood. And now he’s relatively safe again. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

The emergency department has been picked clean of supplies, and there are bodies everywhere. The only things left are the gurneys and the corpses. Everything else has been stripped bare. Albert finds a single vial of diazepam that rolled under a desk, and this is their only salvage. They head for the basement.

Down here, like in the OR, they have to use their flashlights or be completely blind. Unlike the surgical hall, though, the floor has about sixteen inches of water over it, which just slows them down even more. Every step makes loud splashing noises that echo through the black hallways - an eerie undertone that interrupts the crackling of the Geiger counter, which is going off at a level that sounds more than a little concerning even though Harry can’t see the dial.

“How the hell are we gonna find the pharmacy?”

“By looking carefully. A door with a window next to it, behind the window should be a counter. That’s the pharmacy.”

They don’t find the pharmacy right away - actually, they discover the hazmat supply closet. Most of it is stuff they don’t want or need, but there are some Tyvek suits and some respirators, as well as several packs of duct tape. Thankfully these are all light items that are easy enough to carry, and once they’ve been dropped off at the top of the stairs Harry and Albert plunge deeper into the flooded basement. Offices, storage, broken equipment… near the elevators, the entrance to radiology. None of the meters that would’ve been there are anywhere to be found.

When they do make it to the pharmacy, it’s kind of an unpleasant surprise to discover that someone else found it before they did and all the good drugs have been stolen already. Albert is angry but Harry’s relieved, he doesn’t know if he can keep carrying things anyway but now he won’t have to.

At this point, because of his injury, Harry switches jobs with Andy and guards the pile in the building while Andy helps James schlep stuff out to the truck. It’s much easier for him, but it’s also mind-numbing, especially since he’s usually by himself now - Albert is also out at the truck to make sure none of the fragile stuff is getting crushed. So Harry is pacing around by the door, holding his gun and getting radiated.

This goes long into the night and it’s way past dinner time when the last armloads of supplies are being hauled away to get packed. Harry walks back finally and discovers that the bed and the trailer are both jammed full of stuff because they’re taking so much loot from this hospital. God, he doesn’t want to drive back, but everyone else is out of practice and the last thing they need is to crash in the middle of a rainstorm or something now that this awful mission is almost done with.

“Good work, fellas,” Harry says as they all get in the cab. “I think the unpacking can wait until tomorrow, so once we get home we’ll all eat and go straight to bed.”

The drive back is quiet. There’s an air of weariness to all four of his companions, and Harry’s just grateful that he’s the only one who got hurt. For now, he shoves those thoughts away and imagines sleeping in his own bed, wearing comfortable clothes and wrapped up in the blankets with Dale. And that’s really it, he wants to be with Dale again. Harry can’t imagine how much Dale misses him after four days.

Actually, come to think of it, this is the longest anyone’s been away from town at once since everything happened. Maybe that’s why, when Harry’s pulling in at 10:40 pm, each man’s loved ones are waiting for him like he’s coming back from a war. Especially the wives. Only knowing that they’re covered in radioactive dust keeps Norma and Donna and Lucy back from them as they’re shucking their hazmat suits - Harry doesn’t have a wife, but instead he has Dale, who’s also milling around with the others.

The arms that grab onto him are too tight and he flinches at the spike of pain in his left upper back. “Ah, easy there…”

“Are you alright, Harry?”

“Yeah, I’ll be okay, I fell down some stairs and I’m sore.”

“Sore or hurt?” Dale asks skeptically.

“Hurt,” he admits after a second. “Albert thinks I broke a couple ribs.”

“Harry…”

He hugs Dale a little closer. “I’m gonna be okay, Coop, I promise. Just lemme get some water and a couple dinners, then we’ll go home.”

It’s annoying, because he has to unhook the trailer and move everything out of the bed of the truck to a temporary resting spot in the station lobby. He grabs two drums of water and some food, and at 11:23 pm the three of them arrive home. Harry settles Albert first, warming a jar of mushroom soup and then one of the drums of water for a bath. For himself, trout with vegetables.

“It took longer than you thought it would,” Dale comments.

“Yeah, I know. Sorry about that, Coop. I hope you didn’t get too worried.”

“Suffice to say I’m no longer worried, Harry, except for your injury of course. And I’m glad that you’re back now.”

“That makes two of us.” Harry decides not to say anything about how he kept wishing he was here cuddling Dale instead… it’s not really important.

Albert gets out of the bath and heads straight for bed, so now it’s Harry’s turn. He gets the water ready for himself, not without difficulty, and Dale follows him into the bathroom. Apparently this will just be a thing for them now. It turns out to be good for Harry, though, because Dale pulls his shirts off him and then unravels the bandage so that he’s not fighting and struggling and giving himself that much more pain. His pants and socks go and then he carefully gets himself into the water, feeling the bruising in his bad ribs with even small movements.

Reaching for the soap, Harry twists himself over just a little too fast and groans, settling back heavily in the tub with the bar in hand. Actually getting any cleaning done is gonna be a bitch.

“Harry, would you like some help?”

Oh, right, he has Dale.

“Yeah, that’s probably not a bad idea.”

It doesn’t hurt as long as he’s not trying to move, as long as Dale is the one moving him. So Harry stays still and now he understands why Dale’s eyes closed the first time, because he does the same thing, just soaking in the heat of the water on his sore muscles alongside gentle touches from a friendly pair of hands tending to his injured body. Dale is unnecessarily, unbelievably tender with him, it could almost be a lover’s caress. And Harry just wants to absorb it without shame.

“Coop.”

“Yes, Harry?”

“Thanks.”

“Mm-hm.”

Not without some pain, Harry ducks his head under the water for a second and then Dale’s hands are there too, rubbing and massaging the soap into his hair. Harry closes his eyes again and just feels. His brain comes up with the idea somehow of Dale getting into the bath with him, sitting together kinda like how they spoon up in bed… they’ll be spooning up soon in bed anyway… under plenty of… blankets…

“Harry. _Harry._ ”

“Huh?” He jerks a little and opens his eyes only to immediately wince at his ribs.

“I think it would be a good idea for you to dry off and get in bed before you fall asleep in the tub again.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, okay.”

Clean now and soon bundled in clothes he can sleep in, climbing into bed and having Dale fit perfectly in his arms is the best thing Harry’s felt in days. Owing to his hurt ribs, he has to lie down on the opposite side of the mattress from where he usually is, and that’s a little weird. But he doesn’t mind. And he missed Dale so bad while he was out in Spokane, so he pulls his friend in close, nuzzling a little bit into soft black hair and feeling slow breaths against his neck.

The way he falls asleep is a lot more pleasant than the way he wakes up.

It’s about 2:30 am, and his eyes open to the dark because something doesn’t feel right. But it’s a very specific type of _not right._ He’s felt this before, awhile ago… then it hits him full force, and he’s flinging himself off the bed despite the spearing in his bad ribs at the sudden movements. Yank down the blanket, open the window - lean out of the house through that window.

And about one second later his guts start to heave. Harry clings to the windowsill as he throws up over and over again while a cold drizzle soaks into his hair. When that finally stops, he realizes that the veins in his nostrils have all popped - blood drips into his mouth as he gasps for air, leaving an awful copper-salt taste that almost makes him sick all over again. And it _hurts,_ it hurts for his chest to move around this much, the only thing stopping him from dropping to the floor is his arms.

All the strength, what little there was to begin with, floods out of his body. He collapses back into the room and can’t even be bothered to wipe the blood off his face. His ribs throb, his head pounds. And Harry immediately gets scared. He knows exactly what this is because it’s happened before, right after the bombs fell and he came back from Seattle with chemical burns.

“Harry, I’m going to get Albert for you,” comes Dale’s voice from… somewhere.

He remembers. Doc Hayward was still alive, then. It was him and at least fifteen other people, he was in the very first group. The chemical burns made it worse because they had to keep checking his wound dressings… he came back into town with a cloth tied over his face and covered in ash. They washed him off and shaved his head and took all his clothes. And they moved him away from everyone else. The two guys from the civil defense office told the hospital to do that, he and the others with similar problems were in separate rooms. These empty rooms. And the nurses wore surgical coverings just to get near him. But then the evacuation happened and the power went out and nobody was around to take care of him, so Hawk helped him get home. Hawk and Andy brought him food and water, Doc Hayward would come check his wounds. And he recovered eventually on his own.

Dale comes charging back into the room and kneels beside him. “Harry. Albert’s sick, too. What do I do?”

“Get Hawk,” Harry says. “And Andy. They can carry us…”

He stays on his side so that the blood won’t start running down the back of his throat and into his stomach, because he’s not interested in throwing up again. Out in the living room he can hear Dale hurrying to put on rain gear, and meanwhile Albert staggers in to sit clumsily against a nearby wall.

“It was the water.”

“What?” Harry croaks.

“How long were we in the hospital basement?”

“Uh…” Shit, he’s not sure. “Maybe an hour and a half.”

“The water had about forty roentgen. The emergency department had thirty five, the entrance had eighteen.”

“But you were barely anywhere near the entrance, I kept standing guard at night…”

“Yes. So you’re going to get sicker than me.”

Eventually Dale comes back, followed by Hawk and a very exhausted Andy. Harry and Albert are struggled into Gore Tex rain shells and their boots, then more or less dragged outside to sit in the back of the pickup truck with Dale between them and Hawk driving. Harry feels Dale’s hand slide into his, squeezing gently. He squeezes back.

Hanging off of Hawk and Andy, Harry stumbles into the first conference room, where the radiation victims go. They strip him down to his thermals and load him onto a gurney, and Albert, despite also being pale and obviously sick, looks him over while Dale hovers nervously nearby.

“Okay… Hawk, go get Donna,” Albert demands. “Andy, go home and go back to bed. Coop, go to storage, get two IV bags, a thousand milliliters each. Starter kits and tubing to go with them, alcohol pads, a thermometer, tape, two latex tourniquets, one unopened packet of regular strength Tylenol.”

“How bad am I?” Harry asks, afraid of the answer.

“You’re not dying. We may have to give you a blood transfusion down the road, but it’s not a given.”

“Okay. Good.” He starts to shiver and it jars his busted ribs. “Why the hell don’t we have blankets here?”

Albert hands him his Gore Tex jacket and he covers himself up with it, but it doesn’t really help when he’s only wearing long johns and socks. Dale comes back carrying everything Albert asked for, dropping it all in a pile on a small table that’s pushed up against the wall and coming over to hold Harry’s hand.

Hawk returns, bringing not just Donna with him but also some extra lanterns and flashlights, and - thank god - a pile of wool blankets.

“You may be wondering why I dragged you out of bed at three in the morning,” Albert grunts as Hawk and Dale bundle Harry in a heavy warmth. “You have two patients at two different levels of radiation poisoning to take care of.”

Donna glances around. “But where’s the second one?”

“Sitting here giving you orders. By my guess, I took maybe a hundred and fifty rem. Harry’s fifty to a hundred higher…” And he goes off on a brief lecture about the difference in symptoms, what to look for, not to give radiation victims aspirin because it could make them bleed to death internally. “The first thing you do for ARS patients is the first thing you do for any other patient. Get to it.”

The fact that Donna just rolls her eyes and doesn’t get upset about him barking at her is really impressive even considering that she’s probably used to him bossing her around by now. However, Harry also doesn’t know how he feels about being used as a practice dummy for her to do vitals on. At least they don’t really hurt until she starts making him take deep breaths.

“It sounds weird on the left side…”

“That’s actually not related, he broke several ribs yesterday. What’s his temperature?”

“A hundred even.”

“And that’s how you know he’s over two hundred rem, less than that and fevers are very uncommon.”

Donna asks him about his symptoms, and as he’s describing them he realizes that he’s not only a lesson and a practice dummy for her but also an impromptu practical exam. And that makes him really annoyed at Albert, but at least that’s something harmless. What makes him get nervous is when Albert starts talking about IVs, and Harry won’t stand for that.

“Donna, I’m sorry, but I don’t want you sticking me,” he interrupts in the middle of the rant. He knows she’s never done it before or else Albert wouldn’t be explaining so many things.

“But doesn’t he need an IV?”

“He does. I’m going to do him to show you how it’s done, and then you’re going to do mine,” Albert says.

Which is a huge relief. Harry relaxes and just lets Albert place his fluid line, ignoring the step-by-step instructions that are going along with it. Albert also makes him take the Tylenol for his fever and then he falls asleep on the gurney with Dale holding his hand again.


	7. Want This

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's sex at the end of this chapter.

Everyone tries to come visit Harry while he’s laid up with radiation poisoning, but with the exception of Dale, Albert’s policy on visitors is a strict, often very harshly-worded “no.” He’s more vulnerable to infections right now because the gamma rays have killed a bunch of his white blood cells, and it’ll take at least a month for them to recover. So for two days, Dale, Albert and Donna are the only people he sees except when Hawk appears for three seconds at a time to bring them all food.

After that, Harry’s more or less confined at home for awhile. His symptoms go away for about a week, which is weird, but after that he gets sick again. He’s weak and tired all the time, his nose bleeds a lot and completely at random. Red spots appear on his feet and lower legs, probably because that’s where he was submerged in the basement.

Harry’s biggest distraction and comfort is Dale - he’s getting strong again, gaining weight, starting to thrive. At least one of them is doing well. And since Albert gets better pretty much immediately and has people to give checkups to and a med student to boss around, Dale is the one who stays here, taking care of Harry. And that feels very fair, it’s impossible for Harry to have any guilt about it because he took care of Dale before. It just gets them closer together, strengthens their already deep level of trust and affection.

Harry doesn’t remember the last time he was so emotionally attached to someone.

Gradually the nosebleeds stop. His skin turns back to its normal color. The red spots on his legs disappear. When Albert gives him the okay to be around people and do chores again, there’s two feet of snow outside. Dale is back up to his original weight of a hundred and fifty six pounds, which is technically underweight for his height but he doesn’t seem to have any problems with it.

“Harry?”

“Yeah, Coop.”

They’re doing food prep together this afternoon - Harry is packing venison in salt and Dale is mashing potatoes. It’s boring, but easy and not strenuous. And Harry never minds being near Dale. Actually, Dale is without a doubt his favorite person to be around.

“Do you miss dating?”

Harry does his absolute best not to burst out laughing.

“Ah. No, Coop, I don’t. Not even a little. It’s such a hassle, and there’s etiquette to taking women out that just doesn’t make any damn sense, and - no. I don’t miss that one bit.”

“No, I meant the act specifically of being on a date with someone, not the process of dating someone. But going to a nice dinner or a movie or a picnic.”

“Oh… well, y’know, you could probably still go on a picnic as long as you and your date don’t mind wearing hazmat suits and not being able to kiss,” he snorts.

“Harry I don’t believe anyone would be particularly enthusiastic about getting into a hazmat suit just to go sit in a field with me for an hour and do nothing.”

“Alright, tell you what, Coop. If you can’t find anyone to go on a radioactive picnic with you, then I’ll go,” Harry offers, grinning over his shoulder at his friend.

Dale smiles back, but it’s a hundred percent genuine. “To be perfectly honest, Harry, you’re very likely the first person I’d ask to accompany me on a picnic.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he turns back to his meat and the salt bucket. He tries to come up with something in a hurry. “So is this part of your scheme to get to have sex now that you’re not a bag of bones anymore? Because last time I looked there aren’t any cute guys who just moved into town, Coop.”

“For your information, Harry, I actually have very good prospects at the moment.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but don’t tell Albert. He’ll tease me about it.”

Harry chuckles. “Alright, I won’t.”

“May I ask something else?”

“Yeah, ask whatever you want.”

“Are you also unsatisfied with the lack of romantic opportunities in your life of late?”

Now, Harry can’t help but laugh. “Why the hell does it matter? Women don’t like me, Coop. I’m boring and I don’t look good enough to make up for it. Besides, I’m pretty sure most women have bigger things on their minds right now than travelling out to the middle of nowhere to find a date.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

“Y’know… come to think of it, even if I didn’t have better ways to spend my time, I wouldn’t really be that interested in dating anyone right now anyway. It just doesn’t feel that important to me.”

“…alright, then.” A pause. “I don’t think you’re boring, Harry.”

“Well, uh. Thanks, Coop, that means a lot.”

“I also think you should get to be loved, should the opportunity present itself to you. Even disregarding what happened with Josie, I have a very strong feeling that until now you’ve been deeply unlucky when it comes to romantic entanglements.”

Harry shrugs. “I guess I have, but like I said, it doesn’t really matter much right now anyway.”

“There must be some perks of being in a relationship that you’d like to have.”

Harry’s starting to feel like Dale is fishing, but this is a pretty harmless topic, so he immediately forgets that he even has that thought.

“Maybe a few things.” Harry wipes salt and meat juice off his hands on a rag and then turns so he can press himself against Dale’s back, slowly dragging his palms and arms up and around to wrap his friend’s trunk. He rests his chin on Dale’s shoulder. “Things like this… these are some’a my favorite moments with women.” Dale, unexpectedly, actually shudders a little and Harry immediately feels bad. “Sorry. You really are lonely, aren’t you?” He lets go and backs off.

“Lonely isn’t a word I would use to describe the feeling actually,” Dale admits, a little quietly.

“Okay. Well either way.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Harry.”

He’s saved from this sudden weirdness by the appearance of Albert, of all people.

“I’m removing about a hundred thousand porcupine quills from the leg of this idiot, I won’t be home until later.”

“Don’t porcupines hibernate?” Dale wonders.

“No, they hide in dens if the weather’s real bad but they’re active year round,” Harry says.

“In any case, I’ll be teaching a minor procedure, so it’ll probably take twice as long as it should,” Albert gripes. “Don’t wait up for me.”

“Alright, we won’t.”

They finish up what they’re doing and grab jars of stew for dinner, as well as a drum of water because it’s time for Harry’s bath this week. He glances into the second conference room and sees Albert and Donna hovering over the leg of some poor bastard, which indeed has so many quills that it probably _will_ take all night.

“So you want to have a saline buffer with the lidocaine,” Albert is saying, holding up a vial and an empty syringe. “And you also have to be careful and not inject too much over a short period of time, because after a certain level of lidocaine enters the bloodstream it starts to become toxic…”

The sky is clear tonight, which means it’s already so cold out that he’s worried the twenty minute walk will be long enough to freeze his bathwater. (It isn’t.) And the inside of the house isn’t much warmer once they finally get there, so after Harry’s covered up all the windows he builds a huge fire and piles most of the blankets from their bed nearby to get them nice and warm. Both jars of stew are poured into one big pan and they huddle together less than two feet from the fireplace while they wait for their food.

“If we’re lucky, tomorrow it’ll be sunny during the day and then cloud over at night, and it won’t get as cold,” Harry comments, shifting position to sit behind and subsequently wrap around his shivering friend.

Dale leans back against him, into his warmth.

“I’ve never lived in climates that are this temperature before. It’s an adjustment.”

Harry hugs him just that much tighter. “Well, the food’ll warm you right up… you’re too skinny, Coop. We gotta fatten you up some.”

A chuckle. “I’ll make my best effort, but food is only distributed in allotted amounts and I also have an overactive metabolism. It’s alright, Harry, I’ve got you to keep me warm.”

Harry can’t help a smile, which he hides by pressing his face against the back of Dale’s neck even though there’s nobody around to see. Dale melts into him in response, molding the two of them to become one shape. They don’t say anything or move at all for a few minutes, just staying wrapped together to bask in the heat of the flames and the comfort of each other. It feels so satisfying and downright perfect that Harry regrets eventually getting up so he can grab a bowl and a pair of spoons. They sit side-by-side and pressed together, passing the bowl back and forth to take turns having bites. Harry never noticed before how binding it feels to share food with someone like this, eating out of the same dish and deliberately refusing to break physical contact with each other. It seems like he couldn’t possibly get any closer to Dale if he tried.

They finish the stew about the same time that the water is warm enough, and like always now Dale just goes with him into the bathroom. Harry gets everything fixed up for himself and then has an idea. He starts unbuttoning his flannel and then looks at Dale, making a motion with his hand like, you should get in too. But he doesn’t actually have to say a word, his friend just smiles at him and starts to undress.

There’s nowhere near enough room to be side-by-side, so Dale settles in what’s more or less their preferred configuration with his back against Harry’s chest. Allegedly, Harry’s in this bath to get himself clean, but Dale reaches for the soap before he does and starts doing it for him, his legs and lower arms. And like with the stew, they end up passing the soap back and forth. It feels a lot different from either time one of them was laid up and the other was helping him out - but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

At some point, interestingly, the bar of soap becomes more like an excuse to touch. Dale doesn’t have him turn around to get his back and instead sort of hugs him, their chins resting on each other’s shoulders. And Harry gets the soap back but doesn’t make his friend move, just repeats this process himself. He doesn’t bother pretending not to notice that Dale is almost about to get an erection, but he also has no reason to feel like he should say anything about it, so he doesn’t. It’s probably reflexive or something, maybe it has nothing to do with him at all, Dale is lonely and wants to be touched. But Harry also doesn’t mind. It doesn’t bother him even a little.

They get out of the tub. Harry dries off and puts on the bottoms of his thermals and then his sweatpants, but stops and holds still so that Dale can rebandage his ribs. When they’re both dressed, Harry goes to the living room to grab all the blankets that are nice and warm from being near the fire and puts them back on the bed. They climb in at the same time and Dale curls into his chest, folding them together under the cozy pile of wool. Their foreheads touch and the tips of their noses bump, they share breaths.

Harry barely realizes what he’s doing as he moves just a couple inches and kisses Dale.

For some reason, this feels like the only reasonable thing he can do. It’s the lightest possible touch. Dale just barely presses back, Harry almost can’t feel him doing it at first. Their hands find each other’s hair. Dale’s mouth opens for his and the kiss deepens but without becoming frantic. Their stubble scrapes together and a tiny corner of Harry’s mind thinks maybe he should stop and question what this is, why they’re doing this… but he doesn’t want to question anything or even to think at all. What he _does_ want is Dale, and Dale is exactly what he’s getting.

It seems inevitable - they move just a little, only as far back as necessary while still kissing and trying to start undressing each other. And Harry doesn’t care, doesn’t think it matters, that he’s never kissed another man before this. He’s going to keep kissing and touching Dale. He understands that very soon he’ll start learning to make love to a person who’s got the same body parts that he has. Maybe, in another time and place, Harry wouldn’t be so okay with this, would pause and ask questions or even stop altogether. But in this time and place, which is the only one that he has, it’s the only logical outcome.

Shirts and undershirts come off. Ridges and bumps and general changes in texture under his palms inform him about the scarring all over Dale’s torso and shoulders and arms. But it paints a different picture for him than seeing these old wounds. Because looking, it made him sad before, even distressed. But he already knows they’re there, he’s prepared for them and their presence. And they tell him that Dale is the person he’s touching, the only person he wants to touch. And Harry thinks Dale probably has that same thought while feeling him and his injuries, caressing his bound ribs and the chemical burns hiding under the stretchy wrap.

It seems almost tragic that they have to pull away so they can squirm out of their sweatpants and thermals - thankfully it only lasts a few seconds before Harry is able to touch him again, roll him onto his back, settle over top of him, kiss him some more. Hands cling to his shoulders, he slowly slides a palm down Dale’s torso. He’s not hesitant - he should be, but he’s not - and instead wants to take his time.

It’s not something he’s used to feeling on someone else’s body, a velvet texture that covers an iron bar. What really takes him by surprise is that Dale’s not circumcised; he very deliberately wasn’t looking that closely the other times he’s seen Dale naked and so didn’t expect it, most men are and for some reason he’s usually a lone exception. But he kinda likes that. Usually the only cock he has anything to do with is his own, at least now he knows exactly what he’s dealing with. Maybe cut cocks behave differently and he’d have no way to know it.

Dale reaches for the bedside table and fumbles in a drawer, and Harry isn’t prepared to see the tub of Vaseline get pulled out - the one he _knows_ he left somewhere in his kitchen because he had no idea what to do with it at the time or even why he took it home at all. And Harry realizes that he’s an idiot. Subconsciously, he’d apparently definitely had a reason to swipe it for himself and not add it to the stockpile. And it also took him until this second to figure out that Dale was never lonely, Dale wants him, _him specifically._ Dale’s been waiting for him to come to his senses.

Well.

He can deal with all that later.

Harry lets Dale coax him to roll over on his back, but he’s not sure he knows why and maybe it’s going to mean something he’s not really okay with. It doesn’t head that direction, though, Dale slicks up his cock for him and he relaxes again. It kinda starts to make sense, actually, even as he’s gasping helplessly while watching and feeling Dale sink down onto him. It’s probably been awhile, Harry doesn’t know anything about this. Dale can be in control of things and not get hurt by accident.

A hundred things pile into his head. It feels so different. Dale’s cock is leaking onto his stomach a little bit. Shouldn’t he be wearing a condom? When even _was_ the last time he had sex with someone not using one? Actually who cares, condoms are stifling. He never thought Vaseline would be this good of a texture. How is his entire cock fitting into this spot where things aren’t supposed to fit at all? Is he hurting Dale?

Oh, shit.

“Does it hurt?” Harry blurts out, because now he’s worried about that.

“No, I’m fine,” Dale promises.

“Okay. Uh. Okay. Good.” He’s short-circuiting.

It’s really something - this image, Dale fucking himself on Harry’s cock. Not anything he’d ever imagined or even considered. But now, maybe his favorite thing to look at. Harry lays his palms on Dale’s legs to feel the lean muscles flexing. How did he never think to want this before? How didn’t he know that he wants Dale?

Does it even matter, though?

Because he has Dale now.

He thinks both of them are right where they should be.


	8. Propofol

Harry wakes up to the realization that he fell in way over his head and didn’t even notice until last night.

He opens his eyes to a few scattered slivers of the gray light of a winter morning, weighed by a foot-thick layer of blankets with his love in his arms. They’re spooned, so it’s impossible for him to tell right away if Dale’s still sleeping. Harry’s hungry but he doesn’t want to get up. He never wants to get out of bed again as long as the bed is where Dale is. That’s a really stupid thought and he grins to himself, stifling a laugh in case Dale isn’t awake.

“Are you up?” Dale murmurs, settling the question.

“Mm-hm.”

He pulls Harry’s arms a little tighter around himself and Harry’s grin gets bigger for a second before kissing the back of his neck, right under where his hair ends. Harry has to wonder how long it’s been since either of them got to wake up this way with anyone.

“So Harry… am I the right guy?”

“Huh?”

“We were speaking about this at one point before, and you said something about that, ‘maybe if I met the right guy’.”

Oh, yeah, he does kinda remember saying something like that.

“I think I was kidding when I told you that, Coop.”

“You having sex with me last night begs to differ.”

Harry laughs. “Okay, maybe I _thought_ I was kidding and didn’t know that I apparently actually meant it. Better?”

“Yes.”

He decides to go right for the throat, squeezing Dale a tiny bit. “How long’ve you been in love with me, Coop?”

“I can’t answer that with any accuracy. However, the moment that I realized I was in love with you is easy to pinpoint.”

“Oh yeah?”

“When you gave me the fishing lure.”

Harry’s kinda shocked. “Really? That long?”

“That long,” Dale confirms, nodding against the pillow. “I’m going to tell you something that’s absolutely awful now, Harry… the day before the buttons were pressed to launch the nukes, I received a notice informing me that my request to be transferred to the Seattle field office had been approved. I had planned to call you and tell you that I was returning to Washington State… obviously, fate had other things in mind.”

“That’s not that awful. You got back here eventually,” Harry points out.

“Isn’t it funny how the timing of things works out that way sometimes?”

He might as well say it, the rules have changed for things like this and there shouldn’t be any time-wasting or courting or any’a that when it’s not all that unlikely that one or both of them could get killed by something tomorrow or even in the next hour.

“Dale.”

“Yes, Harry.”

“I love you. And I’m sorry I didn’t notice sooner that I do.”

“It’s alright, I knew anyway. I love you, too.”

Dale rolls over in his arms to face him and they share a series of gentle kisses. Harry wants to stay in bed with Dale all day and do nothing… obviously that can’t happen, though. What makes getting up for the day especially painful is the fact that both of them are still naked and it’s god damn _freezing_ in the house. He throws on his long johns first and then takes the blanket off the window so that he can see what he’s doing and not fumble so much while getting dressed.

It’s cold and snowing out this morning, so they bundle up and decide to eat breakfast at the station because if they go there they can have deer sausages and warm apple cider instead of something cold out of a jar. Almost everyone else is also here for the exact same reason, which means they actually have to stand in line just to go in - the food gets passed out from the receptionist window and people are hanging around having their breakfasts in the hallways.

Harry and Dale head to the second conference room to see how Albert’s night went - and find him still asleep on one of the gurneys, wearing his winter coat as a blanket. Harry nudges his foot several times before he starts to stir.

“Grmph… dammit, I have to get up now, don’t I?” Albert grumbles, scrubbing his eyes on his fingertips.

“Only if you want breakfast,” Harry shrugs. “So it was a long surgery, then?”

“Oh, that.” A huge yawn. “No, we got it wrapped up in less than an hour and a half.”

“Then why did you have to sleep here?”

“I figured you might want some privacy. On that note, going forward I don’t even care if you make noise as long as you don’t wake me up after I’ve already fallen asleep.”

The worst part is that Albert says all of this completely seriously and isn’t even being snarky. He knew, somehow, exactly what they were up to and how their night went. Harry doesn’t know how he should feel about that.

After breakfast, Harry looks at the chore schedule and groans. He has one of the shittiest ones, it’ll take all day and he always ends up pulling at least one muscle doing it - walking out to Black Lake with a sled and an axe to get blocks of ice for their food storage. It takes forty minutes to get there on foot and he can’t take the truck because there’s too much snow and obviously no plowed roads, which doesn’t help the soreness he always has when he comes back.

Harry actually has to go home first and change - this job is really hard work, so instead of boiling himself under a puffy coat and pants meant for snow storms, he puts on his Gore Tex shells over his clothes but keeps his gloves, boots and hat. The axe, a heap of bungee cords and a coil of rope are tossed into the sled, then he straps on his snowshoes and leaves. He doesn’t like these snowshoes - they aren’t the same as his old ones, but after stepping into that damn bear trap last winter he had to scrounge up a new pair.

Really, the travelling is the worst part of this job. Because he’s not as well-insulated as normal and not doing any heavy labor, so he’s fucking freezing for the entire walk and he’s also by himself with nobody to talk to. Of course neither of those things are going to change once he actually gets to the lake, but at least then he’ll be distracted by hacking up the ice and trying not to fall through and drown while pulling the blocks out. Today is a good day for this, though, because it was so cold last night - the ice will be nice and thick.

When Harry does finally get to Black Lake, it’s not really snowing anymore, just a few lazy flakes drifting down now and then. It’s always felt a little bit weird for him to look at frozen lakes when they’re covered in snow, even though this isn’t unfamiliar to him - just a vast flat spot of nothing but white. Harry watches this blank emptiness for just a few seconds before grabbing the axe and plodding out to get started.

The ice never comes out in perfect square blocks, which makes it annoying when he’s trying to stack them into the sled. There’s usually rough edges, sometimes the damn things splinter up on him, the bottom side that was touching the water is always bumpy. And it takes about ten minutes to free a chunk, another five to rescue it from the lake and carry it to the sled. He’s got rubber gloves on over his winter gloves and that makes it hard to move his fingers even though they’re warm and dry.

After a couple hours, Harry stops to have a snack and realizes he isn’t hungry. That’s kinda weird, usually he works up a pretty good appetite doing this… oh well. He drinks some water and gets back to work. And maybe he should change how he’s lifting these damn things, he’s starting to have some soreness already, an ache kinda under his belly button. So Harry tries to use his stomach muscles less but it doesn’t really help that much.

Filling the sled seems a little more difficult than usual for some reason. Harry’s not sure why, he’s making pretty good time despite pulling a muscle in his abdomen, but it kinda just _feels_ harder than normal. He’s more relieved than he should be as he’s finally tying everything up with ropes and bungee cords, because he still has to walk all the way back and this shit is heavy.

Heavier than he thought, _damn._ Harry can barely move the sled at first, it makes his gut pain sharper. Even his snowshoes feel like they weigh more than they did walking up. Maybe he’s just more tired than usual, after all he didn’t go right to sleep last night like he usually does…

Dragging the sled gradually becomes a drawn-out torture. Taking steps gives him flashes of pain to go along with the sharp ache that’s already there. He has to get back, though, he has to bring the ice. Then he’ll go home and sleep this off, maybe have some Tylenol from the stockpile. Yeah. It’s a good plan. He just needs a nap or something. Or maybe it’s because he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, he remembers that from when he went hungry last winter, sometimes his stomach would hurt because he couldn’t get enough food for himself.

It takes about twenty more minutes than it should for him to get back into town. Hawk is waiting for him, and Harry doesn’t feel good about the fact that he’s going to duck out on the actual unloading process. But Hawk will understand. Harry comes up and can finally let go of the sled, but then when he tries to explain he can’t get any words out because he’s pitching forward to throw up in the snow. This, at last, convinces him that something is seriously wrong. Does he have radiation poisoning again?

Hawk gets him to the station despite him having to stop and be sick again twice during the walk. Harry feels like there’s a knife in his side, now, and every time he moves it just pushes deeper in. He’s more or less hanging off of Hawk as they come in, and he’s brought right to the second conference room so that Albert can look him over.

“Here, get all this off him,” Albert demands, and at least Harry can just lie here on the gurney and let them undress him. It’s not quite as bad if he can just stay still. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

So he does. Harry makes sure to also put in that the pain moved as it got worse and that he’s also too hot even though they just stripped him. Albert actually looks concerned for once.

“What’s wrong with me?” Harry demands when he sees that expression.

“Oh, so many things…” Albert shakes his head. “Tell me if it gets worse when I do this.” And presses down on the spot where it hurts the most.

This is so bad Harry actually screams. Just on reflex, he backhands Albert away from him and then curls into a ball on his side, holding his stomach because he’s pretty sure all of his guts just exploded.

It only gets worse from there.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Albert comments dryly. “Hawk, is there anything being stored in the staff locker room?”

“Just some water drums I think.”

“Okay. Move everything out of there that isn’t bolted to the floor and then scrub every surface including the walls and ceiling with the harshest disinfectant we have here. Once it’s all clean, close the door and don’t let anyone in there.”

“Okay, but why?”

“He needs surgery. This is very important, too, you and anyone who helps you do this need to wear plastic suits, gloves, and procedure masks. There are clean hazmat suits that are still in the wrappers down in storage, use those. Don’t put them on until you’re actually about to start scrubbing, we want that room as clean as possible.”

“Wait,” Harry interrupts in a shaky voice, “what the hell’s going on here?”

“Appendicitis,” is all Albert says before turning to Donna. “There’s a very long list of items we’ll need for this, grab some paper…” And he rattles off the names of about a hundred different things.

“So how much time…?”

“The chances of it rupturing are low during the first twenty four hours, but after forty eight hours that chance skyrockets,” Albert says bluntly. “So sooner is better than later.” He puts a fluid line into Harry’s elbow. “You’ll be fine. This isn’t a difficult surgery, especially if we get it done right away.”

It turns out that “right away” doesn’t actually mean right away. Harry gets to lie here and suffer for two and a half more hours, because apparently all the packs of surgical supplies also have to be cleaned on the outside so they can be safely opened and remain sterile. Besides that, bundles of flashlights are also wiped with alcohol and then fastened to IV poles or hung from the ceiling because Albert and Donna will obviously have to be able to see really well. Harry doesn’t actually see any of this, he only hears about it because people keep coming to Albert for orders. Meanwhile Albert and Donna only stop hovering over him long enough to go put on actual scrubs.

All Harry can do is lie here and keep waiting, he’s not allowed to even get up off the gurney… as if he could anyway to begin with, considering how bad it hurts by now. He listens to Albert lecturing Donna about Propofol and sterile fields, and also explaining that since he recently had radiation sickness his immune system is weaker than normal so they’ll have to inject him with antibiotics before they even cut but also put him on them for a week afterwards, too.

“Where’s Dale?” Harry only thinks to ask as they’re shooting him up with something else, less than a minute before the moment of truth.

“He was having a panic attack, Lucy’s with him,” Donna explains.

And he doesn’t even have time to ask more questions about that, because then they’re unlocking the gurney and rolling him away to their improvised operating room.


	9. Radiation Complications

“It’s important not to touch the outside of the glove at all if you can avoid it. Especially around the palm and fingers.”

Harry’s been stripped naked and painted in disinfectant, and they also wiped down the gurney he’s on before covering most of him in sterile drapes. He’s sinking down and woozy after they injected him with valium, which is nice, because otherwise he’d be a lot more upset right now. It’s kinda alright for Albert, but he’s known Donna since she was a baby and she’s not supposed to see him without pants on. He knows he should be a lot more mad about that than he actually is at the moment.

Albert leans over Harry, now covered in surgical clothes with a mask and something over his head. “You’ll start to fall asleep in a minute or two, and when you wake up again it won’t hurt anymore. Coop will probably be the first thing you see when you do.”

“Okay,” Harry agrees. Sounds good to him.

Now, Donna is being addressed again. “You’ll have to inject him every seven minutes on the dot. Once we’re done, just stop dosing him and he’ll come to in about ten minutes. Make sure you don’t touch _anything_ but the tool or body part you need to work with, it helps prevent punctures or tears in the glove and maintains a more sanitary hand surface. If a tool falls on the floor, don’t grab it, just get another one.”

Harry loses track of what the ceiling is doing over him. He kinda feels Donna fiddling with his IV again and then she smears into place for a second.

“Okay, Harry, count backwards from ten,” she says, much more nicely than Albert probably would.

“Okay… uh… ten… nine… ten… wait, no…”

And then he wakes up.

He still has an IV, there’s blankets over him but he’s freezing anyway. It’s dark out and there are lanterns. Dale is watching him and holding his hand.

“Hey, Coop,” he croaks. His throat’s really dry, he wants some water.

“How are you feeling?”

“Thirsty. Cold. ’M glad you’re here.”

“So am I. I got too worried and was behaving erratically earlier, so they wouldn’t let me see you prior to surgery.”

“Yeah.” Harry wants to pull the blankets tighter around himself, but he’s afraid something will hurt if he tries to move. “I’m really cold, do I feel cold to you?”

“Yes, your hand is cold. You’ve been lying still for awhile.”

Oh, right.

“Are there more blankets?”

“Let me check.” Dale disappears for a second and comes back holding some. “Here, I’ve brought you two more.”

“Too bad you can’t just get in with me, huh?” Harry grins as Dale wraps him up.

“Yes, that would be a perfect solution if it wasn’t for the lack of available space.”

Harry moves just a little bit, trying to settle himself under the blankets, and notices that the one actually touching him is wet in one spot. He reaches a hand to feel, but it isn’t the blanket, it’s the gauze over where he just got cut open - and it’s soaking. Harry lifts his hand out from underneath to look and his palm is sticky and red.

“Oh, that can’t be good…”

Dale notices, too. “ALBERT!” he bellows, getting up and running for the hallway.

Within two minutes, the bandages are peeled off him and Albert determines that it’s from the radiation exposure… he still hasn’t recovered from that, there aren’t enough platelets in his blood and so the wound can’t clot. He’ll need a transfusion, maybe several, or else he’s going to bleed to death. Great.

A couple of those oxygen tanks they raided from the hospital in Spokane are brought out and tubes get stuck up his nose so he can breathe it in; meanwhile Albert is grilling Hawk about people’s blood types, trying to find out if anyone who lives here has O-neg. Off the top of everyone’s head, they only know one person, who Harry actually donated blood to because she’s also a radiation victim. So obviously she can’t help him. This means they’re going to have to bring everyone here and test them until they find the right people, which might take too long.

Dale wants to do it - he has B-neg and can’t. Hawk and Albert are both A-positive. Albert checks Donna and she has the right blood, so she can buy him some time while they test everyone else. But Harry has no platelets left. He might need up to three pints, which is a lot, you can’t get that much from one person.

What’s really awful for Harry is the helplessness. He’s actively dying and there’s nothing he can do, he’s waiting for the actions of other people. He lies around in the relative dark, holding Dale’s hand and hoping they can find blood for him in time. The first bag of red comes, it goes into his IV port and cuts in front of the saline fluid line to go right in. Donna eats a bowl of something and then gets right back to work, she’s taking her job very seriously and checking his vitals every few minutes along with the incision site.

Albert pops into the room again with a frustrated look on his face. “Condition update.”

“He’s not hemorrhaging as fast as he was,” Donna reports. “But it hasn’t stopped either and his blood pressure doesn’t match his heart rate.”

“Shit,” Albert spits. “Take something and stick it under his feet to prop them up, once all the blood’s in disconnect that bag and give him more fluids. Harry, try to stay calm and awake. I have to go test the next twenty people but if something big happens come get me immediately.” And he leaves again.

Harry silently curses god or whoever for making him have the second most uncommon blood type there is.

A blanket is rolled up and put under his feet and Donna plays with his IV. She vigilantly monitors his blood pressure and how he’s breathing, she repeatedly checks the gushing hole on the side of his stomach and changes the gauze every so often. Harry feels a little bit better when the transfusion is done, but that doesn’t last long, maybe fifteen minutes.

He’s starting to get scared again. Dale is holding his hand and stroking his hair, but Harry can’t pay attention to that when he knows that his life is very literally draining out of him. His arms and legs are starting to feel heavy and if he turns his head the world moves with it like he has a concussion. It takes him a second, but he realizes those are all really bad things.

“Oh my god,” he gasps out. “Oh god, get Albert, I’m gonna die…”

And Dale takes off running to do just that while Donna tries to calm him down because if his heart rate goes up anymore it’ll just make things worse.

Albert comes back. He checks everything and turns up the oxygen, plays with the IV so that the saline will drain into Harry more quickly. Will that even help? Will either of those things make a difference and keep him alive longer? And Dale is starting to panic too, he yells at Albert to go faster even though that’s probably not even possible. Harry still lies here, running out of blood. He’s going to die on this fucking gurney in the conference room of a place he used to work before the world went to hell.

At some point he starts to feel dizzy even when he stays perfectly still, like the world is spinning around him and he shouldn’t dare try to turn his head. Dear god. He’s going to die like this. He’s still cognizant enough to understand that being dizzy is very, very bad. They need to get him more blood but it’s not possible until Albert finds someone with the right type. His breathing feels wrong, like he’s not doing it enough. Donna notices this and asks if he’s feeling dizzy, and when he answers she gets alarmed, too. Everyone is panicking over him but they can’t fix him and he’s going to bleed out.

The tubes are taken out of his nose and he gets an actual mask instead now. It helps a tiny bit, he’s not gasping for air quite as bad. Harry doesn’t let go of Dale’s hand. He figures maybe he should make sure Dale knows he’s still alive for now, he wishes Dale didn’t have to be so scared because of him…

“Harry, stay awake.” Both of them are saying that to him over and over. Wake up. Stay awake. Keep his eyes open. But his eyes don’t want to stay open. He feels so heavy and tired, now. He can’t even be afraid anymore because it’s too exhausting. Maybe he needs a nap…

“Harry. _Harry._ Harry, wake up.”

Wake up.

Yes.

They want him to open his eyes.

“’M t’red…”

“I know you’re tired, but it’s very important for you to not fall asleep right now.”

That must be Dale. He loves Dale, he wants to do what Dale’s telling him. It’s so hard.

“Harry, stay awake for us, okay? Wake up.”

Fingers.

His eyes get pulled open for him.

Light.

A flashlight.

Shining right in his eye.

“Harry.”

Yes.

They’re talking to him.

There’s something he needs to do.

What is it?

“Harry, wake up.”

Wake up.

Stay awake.

But he’s so tired…

He sinks back…

Just a nap…

He can’t…

He can’t…

…can’t…

…can’t wake up…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on Harry possibly needing as much as three pints of blood: it's not because he needs that much right that second when it's brought up, but because it'll take so long for them to find donors and he'll just keep losing blood and keep losing blood while they're trying to get more for him. So he'd have a donation but would still be hemorrhaging, and it would negate any progress that would otherwise be made. Generally if someone needs three pints of blood all at once, immediately, that's almost the level at which they'll be passing out and going into a coma already.
> 
> I sort of imagine that even after he got a pint from Donna when this chapter ends he's missing around 40-45% of his blood volume, which is very quickly reaching the point where a person would be subject to aggressive lifesaving measures in a hospital setting because they're coding. Harry is coding.


	10. Weeks

It’s just pieces coming to him right now.

There’s a giant needle getting yanked out of his chest with a flash of pain to go with it, and Albert is yelling but he doesn’t really know what.

Donna shines lights in his eyes again, says something to him, but he can only groan back at her.

Why do people keep trying to talk to him. It doesn’t make sense. He feels funny. There are fingers touching and poking him. All this because of his damn appendix…

And that’s the first coherent thought he has, is to remember his appendix. It got taken out and then he bled to death, or something. Yeah. That sounds right. Harry squirms a little and feels hands on him again. They made him get undressed and now his back is sticking to this thing.

“Am I dead?” he asks, not even bothering to open his eyes because he wants to know the answer first before he risks it.

“No, you’re going to be fine.” He does open them now, and finds Donna pulling a thermometer out from under his arm. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know. Kinda tired.” Harry rubs his face and notices that for one thing there’s just barely any light coming in through the windows and for another Albert and Dale are both out cold, Albert in a chair and Dale on the next gurney over. “Is Coop sick?”

“No, he just wanted to stay here and be with you. He wouldn’t even lie down until after the fifth time we told him you were going to live.”

“And Albert?”

She frowns a little, but not in an annoyed way. “You stopped breathing, it was a lot of work for him to make you start again.” When she says that, Harry notices the tubes are back in his nose. “It happened right when we were starting the second transfusion, we had to take blood from three people to get you stable again. You woke up a couple of times, do you remember?”

“No, not really.” Harry reaches over and grabs her hand for a second. “You’re gonna be a great doctor, Donna. Will would be real proud’a you right now.”

She smiles and squeezes back a little before letting go. “Thanks.”

Harry dozes for awhile until the sun comes up for real, at which point Albert is also awake and starts poking and prodding him. He’s allowed to get up long enough to put his long johns and socks back on, and while he’s doing that the thin cushioning on the gurney gets wiped down with alcohol because he’s been sweating all over it.

Harry gets applesauce for breakfast because it’s easy to digest and won’t make him nauseous, but Albert also forces him to eat way more of it than he actually wants because he needs to replace a bunch of calories after last night’s debacle. Dale has breakfast with him and says that his hair is getting curly again, and also that apparently after getting stabbed in the chest with a needle of adrenalin he woke up just long enough to call Albert a son of a bitch before passing out again. Harry can’t help a laugh, because that does sound like something he would do.

After breakfast Albert gives him a rundown of things. Because of the radiation poisoning, it’ll take awhile for the incision to fully close, especially since his ribs are still broken and also trying to heal. So it’ll be four or five weeks before he’s allowed to get back to normal, which means no chores, no scavenging, no snow shoveling, no sex. He’s going to be sore for awhile and his stomach will be swollen for a few days. That doesn’t mean inactivity, though, and he should try to get up and walk around a little every so often because it’s good for his recovery. He can’t take an actual bath for at least two weeks, so something will have to be improvised. He has to drink lots of water and take antibiotics every day for the next week. Albert will clean and re-pack his incision site for him until it becomes unnecessary, which will probably hurt the first few times even though he’s being given injections of painkillers.

That’s a lot of instructions, but one thing in particular sticks with him.

“So how long until I can start having sex again?”

“Not until I tell you,” Albert snorts. “And it depends on a few different things… presumably you’re the one topping, correct?”

“I - what?”

“You’re giving and not receiving.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Harry doesn’t see why Albert needs to know that.

“Well, seeing how that requires full range of motion in your abdominal muscles, like I said, not until I say you can,” Albert repeats.

“Even if he’s riding me?” Harry blurts out, then immediately regrets it when Albert’s eyebrow slowly goes up.

“Yes, even in that case. Unnecessary movements should be avoided so that you won’t accidentally tear the giant hole in your stomach back open.”

Harry rubs his forehead. “Okay. Uh. You’re gonna tell Coop that too, right?”

“Sure, I’m feeling generous today and I’ll embarrass you even further with the fact that you can’t even talk to your own boyfriend honestly about sex,” Albert snorts.

“Is it really that much to ask for you to be nice to me after I almost _died_ yesterday?” Harry grumps.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.”

His day is pretty boring after that. He lies around in the conference room mostly, but every so often Albert lets him get up and pace in the hallway for a few minutes. Dale is out doing chores, but comes back for lunch and sits with him while they eat. Later, around dinnertime, he gets some visitors, people checking to see if he made it after the ordeal from last night. Apparently it wasn’t that Albert demanded everyone show up to have their blood type tested - it was that one person heard he was about to die, told everyone else, and all one hundred and something people lined up to wait their turn because they wanted him to live. Harry feels like he shouldn’t be as surprised to learn that as he is.

Dale is extra-gentle while cuddling up to him in bed later. He checks and re-checks if he’s touching any of Harry’s injuries, and when he’s finally satisfied that he isn’t, they both relax and drift off. Harry doesn’t sleep very well - he keeps waking up because he’s uncomfortable, his belly is kinda swollen like Albert said, and rolling around to fix that puts him in a spot that presses on his bad ribs. He can’t win.

A very long week follows after that. Albert forbids him to do anything but lie around in the conference room most of the time, especially in the mornings when he’s on an IV to get his antibiotics and pain medication. It’s boring as hell and a few times Harry really does get convinced that he’s about to lose his mind from the lack of activity.

After the first week, it gets easier. For one thing he no longer needs antibiotics every morning, which means no more IVs, either. That by itself goes a long way to improving his mood, because being stuck is high on the list of things he absolutely hates. He’s slowly allowed to phase back into mundane parts of his routine, which is a small list of Albert-approved activities like sitting and chopping vegetables or helping wash the million canning jars just as long as he’s not carrying anything that weighs more than three pounds. In a way, it’s nice, because sometimes Dale is there doing the same chore with him.

At the end of the five weeks, all that’s left of Harry’s brush with death is a long pink line on the side of his abdomen. He celebrates his return to health by first of all going on an all-day hunting trip with Hawk to try and bag a deer and then that evening by having sex with Dale while holding up his boyfriend’s full weight against the wall just because he can.


	11. Epilogue - A Radioactive Picnic

“I like it,” Harry says as they sit.

“As promised,” Dale tells him, and he can hear the smile in his boyfriend’s voice.

Dale picked a pretty good spot. Truth be told, they don’t know for sure if there’s radioactive fallout or remnants of chemical warfare agents, so of course they had to come here in protective suits and wearing masks. But that’s not really important. The spring grass is coming up, leaves are budding on the trees. Home in Twin Peaks, the potatoes are being planted, a future crop of radishes, various vegetables. The apple trees in Harry’s backyard are flowering. And the sun is even out today - so sitting on this brand new grass at the top of a hill, things could almost be like they were before, except for the hazmat suits. They hold hands through their gloves.

“So did you plan for us to go on this date before you got to Twin Peaks?” Harry asks.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word ‘plan,’” Dale admits. “It was more of a wishful daydream that I used to keep myself occupied and not focus on my empty stomach and the blisters under my boots. And in the daydream, you would tell me that you knew a nice spot which wasn’t contaminated. The sun would be shining like it is now, and we wouldn’t be forced to wear MOPP gear. Often this daydream ended with us making love.”

Harry smiles behind his mask. “How does the actual lovemaking stack up?”

“Infinitely superior in every way.”

“Even that time I accidentally elbowed you in the face?”

“Harry, I would still take the elbowing incident over the loveliest fantasy any time. At the end of the day, a fantasy is still only a fantasy. I’d much rather have you for real.”

They lie back with the crinkling of Tyvek and stare up at the wispy clouds, still holding hands.

“You daydream about me a lot, Coop?”

“Not as much anymore, because I see you every day. But it was constant during the walk. There are more times than I care to admit, often due to injury or illness and eventually because of starvation, that I wanted to give up. In fact the thought often came that it would be much easier for me to simply lay down and die. At no point was I looking for any sanctuary, or for a less dangerous or contaminated location to live. The only thing I came back for was you.”

“I knew you’d come back.”

“Yes, you mentioned that.”

“It was real weird, though,” Harry admits, squeezing Dale’s hand a little tighter. “I kinda had to work out the logic of it, that maybe you would’a heard somehow that it wasn’t as bad here, that we were living more or less fine. But I had to come up with that thought on my own. Even before that, I just… knew. I knew I’d see you again eventually.”

“I love you, Harry.”

“I love you, too.”

“And I want you to know that I appreciate you not asking too many questions about what it was like. There are incidents which I would prefer to forget and may never be able to speak about, and I just want to thank you for being understanding.”

“It’s not a problem,” Harry shrugs, rolling his head to look at Dale. “And it’s been long enough now that I’ve made peace with it. I know it was awful out there for you, but you’re not out there anymore, and that’s the most important thing in my book.”

“I don’t have words to describe precisely how it felt in October,” Dale says. “I wasn’t prepared for you to hand me a picture of myself, because it inexplicably failed to occur that you might be actively searching for me. The only term I can think of would be ‘overwhelming joy,’ but that’s not accurate and doesn’t begin to cover it. You were the only thing I wanted to see.”

“Sometimes you’re _still_ the only thing I want to see.” Harry shuffles sideways until they’re touching through their suits. “I kept forgetting to tell you about this until now, but back in November when me and Albert raided the hospital I got so lonely at night once we stopped working. I just had to sit there in the dark and wish I was with you instead. Then we came back, and you were waiting for me, and that’s kinda like what you were talking about just now. You were the only thing I wanted to see.”

“We should get married,” is how Dale responds to that.

“Who’d marry us?”

“It doesn’t matter. On your next scavenging run, make your best effort to find two wedding bands which will both fit on your ring finger. We have the same sized hands after all.”

Harry shakes his head and grins even though he knows it’s hidden in his respirator. “Dale, if you’re gonna get me to marry you, then you need to propose the right way like the gentleman I know you are - that means down on your knee with a nice sparkly rock the way it’s been done for… however long people have been doing that.”

Dale chuckles beside him. “Alright, I’m sure I can come up with something. But Albert will tease both of us for it.”

“He can say whatever he wants, it’s not like he can stop us.”

“He wouldn’t even try,” Dale agrees. “He’d only be sarcastic like he always is about everything.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to find any champagne or cake for us, though, so will you settle for a nice big bowl of steelhead trout that I cook on the fire at home and doesn’t come out of a jar?”

“Oh, that sounds like more than an acceptable substitute.”

“Alright, then. But you need to propose better first before that happens.”

“I will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A third installment of this concept has been written, so keep your eyes open, it'll be going up very soon! :)

**Author's Note:**

> Updates are on Saturdays.
> 
> All my Twin Peaks fics can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Brelationship_ids%5D%5B%5D=127943&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&user_id=Aaron_The_8th_Demon).
> 
> Comments are welcomed, encouraged, and greatly appreciated :)


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